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''bedizen'' ▫ᴱᴺ Entries

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''bedizen'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260331180822-00-⌔

bedizen - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Verb

bedizen (third-person singular simple present bedizens, present participle bedizening, simple past and past participle bedizened) (transitive, literary)

  • (also figurative) To dress or ornament (someone or something), especially in a gaudy, showy, or tasteless manner.
    • ✤ Synonyms: bedaub, embellish, gaud, overdecorate
    • ✤ Coordinate term: bedazzle
    • ✤ Self is a great Fop and a great Slattern: Soul has given her very good Cloaths, fine Ornaments, plain and neat, but Self either leaves them, like a Slut, in every Corner of the Houſe; or vvhen ſhe puts them on, ſhe does bedizen them vvith Lace and Embroidery, Fringes and Ruffles, Patches, and Povvder, that you can hardly ſee enough of the Garment to diſtinguiſh the excellent Stuff vvhich it is made of: […]1
    • ✤ Thus the Violet that gayly bedizens the Mead/A fragrance more ſvveet does ſupply,/Tho’oft’ rudely bruſh’d by the Traveller’s tread,/Than if rear’d in the garden hard bye.2
    • ✤ [T]he whole[group] had been bedizzened out, into a burlesque imitation of an antique masque.3
    • ✤ You have bedizened me in green, a colour he detests. Lo you! let me have a blue robe, and—search for the ruby carcanet, which was part of the King of Cyprus’s ransom—it is either in the steel-casket, or somewhere else.4
    • ✤ They would rather see the rising generation exhibit a partiality for the tawdry tinsel in which a false philosophy bedisens its votaries, than find them intent only on the splendours of an unseen, and, to their low and sceptical minds, unreal state of existence.5
    • ✤ The first who passed him was a man about thirty, with a gait at once jaunty and clumsy, and who was so outrageously bedizened with eye-glass, watch-chain, and stock buckle, gay satin waistcoat, and new white continuations meant to apologize for a seedy coat, as to give the idea of a servant out of place.6
    • ✤ Suppose you get in cheap made dishes from the pastrycook’s, and hire a couple of green-grocers, or carpet-beaters, to figure as footmen, dismissing honest Molly, who waits on common days, and bedizening your table (ordinarily ornamented with willow-pattern crockery) with twopenny-halfpenny Birmingham plate.7
    • ✤ I’m thinking you’re too fine for the like of me, Shawn Keogh of Killakeen, and let you go off till you’d find a radiant lady with droves of bullocks on the plains of Meath, and herself bedisened in the diamond jewelleries of Pharaoh’s ma.8
    • ✤ [A] Frenchman, viewing the undraped statues which bedizen his native galleries of art, either enjoys them in a purely æsthetic fashion—which is seldom possible save when he is in liquor—or confesses frankly that he doesn’t like them at all; whereas the visiting Americano is so powerfully shocked and fascinated by them that one finds him, the same evening, in places where no respectable man ought to go. All art, to this fellow, must have a certain bawdiness, or he cannot abide it.9
    • ✤ Twenty-four hours later we were both in the vast halls of the Winter Palace in full uniform, as bedizened with gold as a nouveau riche ’s drawing-room.10
    • ✤ She wore only the subtlest touch of make up and round her delicate throat only a single string of pearls. Among the hundred bedizened women she was a rarity.11
    • ✤ Dolores flitted around the car, screaming like a banshee, her face bedizened with fury.12
  • (Northern England) To make (someone or something) dirty; to bedaub, to besmear, to dirty.
    • ✤ Synonyms: bedirty, befoul, sully; see also Thesaurus: dirty
    • ✤ Slinger brast aght o’th’door like a roarin lion,—but he wor sooin collard, an’ he wor soa bedisend with soft cake an’puttaty pillins at his own mother could’nt ha owned him.13

Etymology

📊 ➺

From be- (intensifying prefix) +‎ dizen (“to attire, dress, especially showily”).14 Dizen is derived from dialectal dize (“to put (tow) on a distaff”), probably from Middle English ﹡disen, from Old English ﹡disan, ﹡disian, from ﹡dise, ﹡disen (“bunch of flax on a distaff”), from Proto-Germanic ﹡disanō (“distaff”); further etymology unknown.

Pronunciation

  • (Received Pronunciation) IPA: /bɪˈdaɪz(ə)n/, /-ˈdɪ-/
  • Audio (Southern England);/bɪˈdaɪzən/:/bɪˈdɪzən/(file) 🔊 🔊
  • (General American) IPA: /bɪˈdaɪzən/, /-ˈdɪ-/
  • Audio (General American);/bɪˈdaɪzən/:/bɪˈdɪzən/(file) 🔊 🔊
  • Rhymes: -aɪzən, -ɪzən
  • Hyphenation: be‧diz‧en

Printed 2026-06-28.

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Footnotes

  1. 1723 August 10 (date written; Gregorian calendar), Rev. Dr. ﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡ [pseudonym], “A Letter of Advice to a Young Lady, who had Married above Herself, Grew Vain, and Despis’d Her Husband”, in Alexander Pope, Mr Pope’s Literary Correspondence, volume II, London: […] E[dmund] Curll, […], published 1735, →OCLC, pages 69–70: ↩

  2. 1792, J [ames Cartwright] Cross, “The Orphan Boy, a Simple Pathetic Tale”, in Parnassian Trifles. Being a Collection of Elegiac, Pastoral, Nautic, and Lyric Poetry, London: […] [F] or the author, at the Minerva Press, and sold by William Lane, […], →OCLC, page 53: ↩

  3. 1820 January 1, Geoffrey Crayon [pseudonym; Washington Irving], “Christmas Day”, in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., number V, New York, N.Y.: […] C[ornelius] S. Van Winkle, […], →OCLC, page 440: ↩

  4. 1825 June 22, [Walter Scott], chapter III, in Tales of the Crusaders. […], volume IV (The Talisman), Edinburgh: […] [James Ballantyne and Co.] for Archibald Constable and Co.; London: Hurst, Robinson, and Co., →OCLC, page 48: ↩

  5. 1838 October, “Art[icle]. III.— The System of National Education in Ireland;—Its Principles and Practice. By J. C. Colquhoun, Esq,, M.P. Cheltenham: Wright. 1838. [book review]”, in The Church of England Quarterly Review, volume IV, number VIII, London: William Pickering, […], →OCLC, page 411: ↩

  6. 1842, [anonymous collaborator of Letitia Elizabeth Landon], chapter XXXIX, in Lady Anne Granard; or, Keeping up Appearances. […], volume II, London: Henry Colburn, […], →OCLC, pages 200–201: ↩

  7. 1846 February 28 – 1847 February 27, W[illiam] M[akepeace] Thackeray, “Dining-out Snobs”, in The Book of Snobs, London: Punch Office, […], published 1848, →OCLC, page 71: ↩

  8. 1907 January 26 (first performance), J[ohn] M[illington] Synge, “The Playboy of the Western World”, in Aidan Arrowsmith, editor, The Complete Works of J. M. Synge: Plays, Prose and Poetry (Wordsworth Poetry Library), Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, published 2008, →ISBN, Act III, page 114: ↩

  9. 1918, H[enry] L[ouis] Mencken, “The Tone Art”, in Damn! A Book of Calumny, New York, N.Y.: Philip Goodman, →OCLC, page 106: ↩

  10. 1921, Lord Frederic Hamilton [i.e., Frederick Spencer Hamilton], chapter IX, in Here, There and Everywhere, London: Hodder and Stoughton, →OCLC, page 231: ↩

  11. [1943], Marjorie Barnard, “Arrow of Mistletoe”, in The Persimmon Tree and Other Stories, Sydney, N.S.W.: The Clarendon Publishing Company, →OCLC, page 12: ↩

  12. 1969, Maya Angelou, chapter 31, in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, New York, N.Y.: Random House, →LCCN, page 240: ↩

  13. 1876, John Hartley, “Ther’s a Mule i’ th’ Garden. A Christmas Story.”, in Yorksher Puddin’. A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories, Wakefield, West Yorkshire: William Nicholson and Sons; London: Simpkin, Marshall and Co.; […], →OCLC, page 51: ↩

  14. “bedizen, v.”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, December 2024; “bedizen, v.”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022. ↩

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