costive

comparative more costive · superlative most costive

1. Constipated.

   Melanie, who was used to Wani's costive memos, and even to dressing up the gist of a letter in her own words, stuck out her tongue in concentration as she took down Nick's old-fashioned periods and perplexing semicolons.

   2004, Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty […], 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Bloomsbury Publishing, →ISBN, page 346

   2 more examples

   When I was mortall, this my costiue corps / Did lap vp Figs and Raisons in the Strand, / Where sitting I espi'd a louely Dame, / Whose maister wrought with Lingell and with All, / And vnder ground he vampied many a boote.

   1607 (first performance), [Francis Beaumont], The Knight of the Burning Pestle, London: […] [Nicholas Okes] for Walter Burre, […], published 1613, →OCLC, Act V, signature K3, recto

   Is it fit——goodnatured man! thou should’st sit up, with the wound upon thy groin, whole nights baking thy blood with hectic watchings?——Alas! ’twill exasperate thy symptoms,—check thy perspirations—evaporate thy spirits—waste thy animal strength, dry up thy radical moisture, bring thee into a costive habit of body,——impair thy health,——and hasten all the infirmities of thy old age.—O my uncle! my uncle Toby.

   1659, Laurence Sterne, chapter XXVIII, in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

2. informalMiserly, parsimonious.

   For quotations using this term, see Citations:costive.

   1 more example

   Well, the shoemaker and his wife, Louise, may have been poor, needy, indigent, destitute, impecunious and impoverished — at least before the elves came along — but they had never been parsimonious, costive, miserly, penny-pinching or stinting. They were far from being avaricious, rapacious, mean or greedy. The shoemaker was uxorious about his wife, Louise, but he had never been usurious, even when he had money to lend […]

   2006 July 1, Hugh Conlon, Nine Familiar Fables, Lulu.com, →ISBN, page 73