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''ornament'' ▫ᴱᴺ Entries

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

ornament - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

ornament (countable and uncountable, plural ornaments)

  • An element of decoration; that which embellishes or adorns.
    • ✤ Synonyms: see Thesaurus: decoration
    • ✤ Dust are our frames; and, gilded dust, our pride/Looks only for a moment whole and sound;/Like that long-buried body of the king/Found lying with his urns and ornaments,/Which at a touch of light, an air of heaven,/Slipt into ashes and was found no more.1
    • ✤ I’m a bit short on brain myself; the old bean would appear to have been constructed more for ornament than for use.2
    • ✤ Drawings and pictures are more than mere ornaments in scientific discourse. Blackboard sketches, geological maps, diagrams of molecular structure, astronomical photographs, MRI images, the many varieties of statistical charts and graphs: These pictorial devices are indispensable tools for presenting evidence, for explaining a theory, for telling a story.3
    • (by extension) Christmas ornament: a Christmas tree decoration.
  • (music) A musical flourish that is unnecessary to the overall melodic or harmonic line, but serves to decorate that line.
  • (Christianity, in the plural) The articles used in church services.
  • (biology) A characteristic that has a decorative function (typically in order to attract a mate)

Verb

ornament (third-person singular simple present ornaments, present participle ornamenting, simple past and past participle ornamented)

  • To decorate.
    • ✤ We will ornament the windows with trim to make the room seem brighter.
    • ✤ After this, perhaps, the next most imposing structure in Liverpool is the railway station; it is built of stone, richly ornamented with thirty-six columns of the Corinthian order.4
  • To add to.
    • ✤ The editor ornamented his plain writing, making it fancier but less clear.
    • ✤ Not a scene goes by that hasn’t been ornamented with a split screen, a freeze frame, a caption, a voice-over, a switch between monochrome and colour, or a change of the aspect radio.5

Etymology

From Middle English ornament, from Old French ornement, from Latin ornamentum (“equipment, apparatus, furniture, trappings, adornment, embellishment”), from ornāre (“to equip, adorn”). The verb is derived from the noun.

Pronunciation

  • (noun)
    • (UK) IPA: /ˈɔː(ɹ)nəmənt/
    • (US) IPA: /ˈɔɹnəmənt/,
    • (Southern US) IPA: /ˈɔɹdəmənt/
    • Audio (US): 🔊
  • (verb)
    • (UK) IPA: /ˈɔː(ɹ)nəmənt/, /ˈɔː(ɹ)nəˌmɛnt/
    • (US) IPA: /ˈɔɹnəmənt/, /ˈɔɹnəˌmɛnt/, enPR: ôrʹnə-mənt, ôrʹnə-mĕnt’

Printed 2026-06-28.

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Footnotes

  1. 1864, Alfred Tennyson, “Aylmer’s Field”, in Enoch Arden, &c., London: Edward Moxon & Co., […], →OCLC, page 51: ↩

  2. 1919, P. G. Wodehouse, My Man Jeeves: ↩

  3. 2012 March, Brian Hayes, “Pixels or Perish”, in American Scientist ‎, volume 100, number 2, archived from the original on 19 February 2013, page 106: ↩

  4. 1958 October, “Liverpool to London in 1842”, in Railway Magazine, page 679: ↩

  5. 2021 July 12, Nicholas Barber, “The French Dispatch: Four stars for Wes Anderson’s latest”, in BBC ‎: ↩

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Secondary

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