MONKISH

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does monkish mean? 

• MONKISH (adjective)
  The adjective MONKISH has 1 sense:

1. befitting a monk; inclined to self-denial

  Familiarity information: MONKISH used as an adjective is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• MONKISH (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Befitting a monk; inclined to self-denial

Similar:

nonindulgent; strict (characterized by strictness, severity, or restraint)

 Context examples 

“Why, he is a sort of monkish attorney,” replied Steerforth.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

A woman, in monkish precepts, had been the embodiment and concentration of what was dangerous and evil—a focus whence spread all that was to be dreaded and avoided.

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

I had actually, at times, considered myself outside the pale, a monkish fellow denied the eternal or the passing passions I saw and understood so well in others.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

Ha! mon petit, cried the bowman, you take me back to the days when you were new fledged, as sweet a little chick as ever pecked his way out of a monkish egg.

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

A monkish upbringing, one year in the world after the age of twenty, and then a free selection one way or the other—it was a strange course which had been marked out for him.

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Sir Nigel, meanwhile, had found a foeman worthy of his steel for his opponent was none other than Sebastian Gomez, the picked lance of the monkish Knights of Santiago, who had won fame in a hundred bloody combats with the Moors of Andalusia.

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Yet here, day after day for an hour after nones, and for an hour before vespers, he found himself in close communion with three maidens, all young, all fair, and all therefore doubly dangerous from the monkish standpoint.

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

To the right Sir Oliver, Aylward, Hordle John, and the bowmen of the Company fought furiously against the monkish Knights of Santiago, who were led up the hill by their prior—a great, deep-chested man, who wore a brown monastic habit over his suit of mail.

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)