A word that means "given to frequent censorship"?

Question

I always assumed that the word censorious meant someone or something that is given to censorship. Like if you say that a community, an organization, or a person is overly-censorious, that means they frequently or unnecessarily censor content. But I just looked up the word in my favorite dictionary and found that censorious has a different meaning than what I thought:

censorious

1. Addicted to censure and scolding; apt to blame or condemn; severe in making remarks on others, or on their writings or manners.
2. Implying or expressing censure.

So, a censorious person is not a person who is quick to censor. Too bad, because I thought that was a useful word!

Is there an actual word that means "being given to excessive censorship"?

Example: I might criticize a film distributor as being _____ because they often censor controversial content whenever they release a new edition of a classic film.

Answer 1

The adjective associated with censorship is censorial, not censorious.

From the OED:

censorial: Of, pertaining to, or characteristic of a censor.
censorious: Addicted to censure; severely critical; faultfinding.

So you could use overly censorial, which definitely has been used for the meaning you want.

However, it's a somewhat uncommon word—for example, it's not in the Cambridge Dictionary—and people may get it confused with censorious. On the positive side, if people don't confuse it with censorious, its meaning is fairly obvious from its construction.

Answer 2

You could perhaps use expurgatious which is derived from expurgate which means

to cleanse of something morally harmful, offensive, or erroneous

especially : to expunge objectionable parts from before publication or presentation

an expurgated edition of the letters

expurgation noun

expurgator noun

I wasn't able to find expurgatious listed in any dictionary while googling, but it seems to have been coined by John Milton, the English poet and philosopher who appears to have used it in 1641.

According to John Witte Jr. in the article Prophets, Priests, and Kings: John Milton and the Reformation of Rights and Liberties in England and quoting Milton from the Complete Prose Works of John Milton in reference to Milton's pronouncements on censorship Milton expressed that

"Nothing is more sweet to man" than freedom of speaking and writing, he wrote in 1641. But for the free born people of England, all free speaking and free publication have long been "pinched," "girded, and straight laced" by "monkish prohibitions, and expurgatious indexes" kept by "some mercenary, narrow-souled, and illiterate chaplain." Censorship is silly and self-defeating for the church, Milton argued.

Apropos Bowdlerize mentioned by @Tim in comments to OP’s question, Merriam-Webster adds in the “did you know”section of the definition linked above that

Expurgation has a long and questionable history. Perhaps history's most famous expurgator, or censor, was the English editor Thomas Bowdler, who in 1818 published the Family Shakespeare, an expurgated edition of Shakespeare's plays that omitted or changed any passages that, in Bowdler's opinion, couldn't decently be read aloud in a family. As a result, the term bowdlerize is now a synonym of expurgate.