Pecksniff

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A person who pretends to be virtuous and moral while being hypocritical ; someone whose sanctimonious manner conceals self-interest and insincerity
2. Someone who affects great piety and righteousness yet behaves with hypocrisy ; a smugly self-satisfied individual who is secretly insincere in their moral pronouncements
3. A hypocrite who puts on a show of goodness and principle ; a person whose sanctimonious, self-righteous manner masks a lack of genuine sincerity

Etymology: Seth Pecksniff is a character in Charles Dickens's novel "Martin Chuzzlewit", published in 1844, and the word "pecksniff" grew directly out of him. Dickens drew him as a surveyor and architect who presents himself as a model of virtue while his actual professional record is empty: he has never designed or built anything. Readers recognised the type at once, and the character's name became a common noun for a person whose piety and moral display are a cover for self-interest. Dickens built the joke into the name itself. Pecksniff's smug, soft-spoken hypocrisy is the whole point of the character, and the name carried that tone so effectively that it outlasted the novel. Because the word comes from a single literary creation, it is one of the few English words whose entire history can be traced to one author's imagination and one book.

Synonyms: hypocrite, tartuffe, phony