Uriah Heepish

comparative more Uriah Heepish · superlative most Uriah Heepish

1. Exhibiting cloying, insincere obsequiousness.

   Flunky opens the door, his face wreathed in a Uriah-Heepish smile of servility.

   1897 August, Paul E. Jenks, “Coasting the Mediterranean Awheel”, in Outing, volume XXX, number 5, page 462

   3 more examples

   I am never going to adopt the Uriah Heepish attitude toward trustees that characterized Mrs. Lippett's manners.

   1915, Jean Webster, Dear Enemy, Grosset & Dunlap, page 77

   In the unlikely event that he read off-the-cuff, he couldn't have known that the clumsy schoolboy Widmerpool, at first so Uriah Heepish in his creepy false humility, "the embodiment of thankless labour and unsatisfied ambition," would turn out to be a monstrous and dangerous hypocrite.

   2001, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Face to Face: A Reader in the World, Beacon Press, page 18

   Until now the friar had appeared to be a scheming, cowering, Uriah Heepish type, ashamed of his controversial sermon, terrified of its implications for his future, ready to be used anew by the papal legates, just as he had been used by the Pigeon League.

   2005, James Reston, Jr., Galileo: A Life (Beard Books, 2005) p. 152