Word of the Day

: June 27, 2018

bedizen

verb bih-DYE-zun

What It Means

: to dress or adorn gaudily

bedizen in Context

The children entertained themselves for hours with the contents of the old trunk, donning fancy dresses and bedizening themselves with jewelry and scarves.

"Designed by architect Pierre Dené, the two-story 'rancho deluxe' bedizened itself with every California-style feature that defined its era. It had a Roman brick fireplace, terrazzo floors and big dramatic windows." — Lisa Gray, The Houston Chronicle, 20 Apr. 2008

Did You Know?

Bedizen doesn't have the flashy history you might expect—its roots lie in the rather quiet art of spinning thread. In times past, the spinning process began with the placement of fibers (such as flax) on an implement called a distaff; the fibers were then drawn out from the distaff and twisted into thread. Bedizen descends from the older, now obsolete, verb disen, which means "to dress a distaff with flax" and which came to English by way of Middle Dutch. The spelling of disen eventually became dizen, and its meaning expanded to cover the "dressing up" of things other than distaffs. In the mid-17th century, English speakers began using bedizen with the same meaning.