VIRTUOUS

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does virtuous mean? 

• VIRTUOUS (adjective)
  The adjective VIRTUOUS has 2 senses:

1. morally excellent

2. in a state of sexual virginity

  Familiarity information: VIRTUOUS used as an adjective is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• VIRTUOUS (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Morally excellent

Similar:

impeccable (not capable of sin)

impeccant; innocent; sinless (free from sin)

Also:

chaste (morally pure (especially not having experienced sexual intercourse))

good (morally admirable)

moral (concerned with principles of right and wrong or conforming to standards of behavior and character based on those principles)

pious (having or showing or expressing reverence for a deity)

righteous (characterized by or proceeding from accepted standards of morality or justice)

Antonym:

wicked (morally bad in principle or practice)

Derivation:

virtue (the quality of doing what is right and avoiding what is wrong)

virtue (a particular moral excellence)

virtuousness (the quality of doing what is right and avoiding what is wrong)

Sense 2

Meaning:

In a state of sexual virginity

Synonyms:

pure; vestal; virgin; virginal; virtuous

Context example:

men have decreed that their women must be pure and virginal

Similar:

chaste (morally pure (especially not having experienced sexual intercourse))

Derivation:

virtue (morality with respect to sexual relations)

 Context examples 

I was young, to be sure; but I thought much the better of her for this sympathy, and fancied it became her, as a virtuous wife and mother, very well indeed.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

Run down, my dear fellow, and open the door, for all virtuous folk have been long in bed.

(The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Believe me, they are not only natural, they are philanthropic and virtuous.

(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)

Oh that I were a minstrel, that I might put it into rhyme, with the whole romance—the luckless maid, the wicked socman, and the virtuous clerk!

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

She had just settled this point when the end of the path brought them directly upon the general; and in spite of all her virtuous indignation, she found herself again obliged to walk with him, listen to him, and even to smile when he smiled.

(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)

Finding the door locked again, she left the note to do its work, and was going quietly away, when the young gentleman slid down the banisters, and waited for her at the bottom, saying, with his most virtuous expression of countenance, What a good fellow you are, Jo!

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)

But they thought the want of moral virtues was so far from being supplied by superior endowments of the mind, that employments could never be put into such dangerous hands as those of persons so qualified; and, at least, that the mistakes committed by ignorance, in a virtuous disposition, would never be of such fatal consequence to the public weal, as the practices of a man, whose inclinations led him to be corrupt, and who had great abilities to manage, to multiply, and defend his corruptions.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

Elinor honoured her for a plan which originated so nobly as this; though smiling to see the same eager fancy which had been leading her to the extreme of languid indolence and selfish repining, now at work in introducing excess into a scheme of such rational employment and virtuous self-control.

(Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen)

But with me there is a limit, and when I find a man who keeps his cigars in the coal-scuttle, his tobacco in the toe end of a Persian slipper, and his unanswered correspondence transfixed by a jack-knife into the very centre of his wooden mantelpiece, then I begin to give myself virtuous airs.

(The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)