Purple prose is a style of writing characterized by overly flowery language that tends to draw attention to itself, and away from the story being told. Its typical features include excessive adjectives, exaggerated metaphors, multisyllabic words, long sentences, and elaborate descriptions of a character’s inner thoughts and feelings.

In literary criticism, purple prose is overly ornate prose text that may disrupt a narrative flow by drawing undesirable attention to its own extravagant style of writing, thereby diminishing the appreciation of the prose overall. Purple prose is characterized by the excessive use of adjectives, adverbs, and metaphors.

A generally pejorative term for writing or speech characterized by ornate, flowery, or hyperbolic language is known as purple prose. Contrast it with plain style.