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pornography

nounverbattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//pɔːˈnɒɡ.ɹə.fi//
  • United States//pɔɹˈnɑ.ɡɹə.fi//

The explicit literary or visual depiction of sexual subject matter; any display of material of an erotic nature.

noun

  1. 1

    The explicit literary or visual depiction of sexual subject matter; any display of material of an erotic nature.

    Many websites have a complete ban on pornography.

    1929, D. H. Lawrence, Pornography and Obscenity, pamphlet, republished in 1998, Michael Herbert (editor), D. H. Lawrence: Selected Critical Writings, Oxford University Press, page 294, What is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another.

    The dispute over pornography and censorship has split both liberals and feminists.

    In Chapter 3 we reviewed the various views about sexual offending, and noted that there is a paucity of research on the role of child pornography in adult sexual interest in children.

  2. 2

    The depiction of (non-sexual) subject matter so that it elicits feelings analogous to erotic pleasure; any such depiction.

  3. 3

    The graphic, detailed, often gratuitous depiction of something.

    In The Four Pillars of Wisdom, he devotes a well-deserved chapter to the financial press and its weakness for "financial pornography"—lurid coverage of star money managers.

Etymology

Borrowed from French pornographie. By surface analysis, porno- + -graphy.

verb

  1. 1

    To turn into pornography.

    Their very being is so pornographied by automated content filters that they are largely barred from sexual expression online.

    [JD] Vance also expressed concerns about the use of AI technology, adding that it was being used to fuel “hyper-pornographied slop”, sources at the meeting said.

Forms

plural
pornographies
past tense
pornographied
past participle
pornographied
present participle
pornographying
third person singular
pornographies
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).