Word of the Day!

bedizen [bih-dahy-zuhn, -diz-uhn]

verb:
dress up or decorate gaudily

Examples:

Similarly, the indigenous flowers she wore in her hair and the native jewelry she used to bedizen herself with were also reflections of her love for Mexico and her nationalist stance. Kahlo "would take her inspiration from the different cultures within Mexico," Hayek says. (Joobin Bekhrad, London museum exhibition focuses on Frida Kahlo as a style icon, The Washington Post, July 2018)

It's the kind of setting where the high-flying, swanlike necks of glass wine decanters fit right in. Not to mention the absurd flecks of gold leaf that bedizen a carpaccio here, a cocktail there. (Alsion Cook, Review: Potente, Jim Crane's Italian fine-dining restaurant downtown, defies expectations, The Houston Chronicle, December 2017)

The comic touches that bedizen Wodehouse’s prose are one of its chief delights. (Joseph Epstein, Frivolous, Empty, and Perfectly Delightful, Claremont Review of Books, Spring 2018)

Mirrors being very rare, the women bedizen themselves with tinsel, the bizarre effect of which they have no means of appreciating. (W H Davenport Adams, Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century)

Man's Reason is in such deep insolvency to sense, that tho' she guide his highest flight heav'nward, and teach him dignity morals manners and human comfort, she can delicatly and dangerously bedizen the rioting joys that fringe the sad pathways of Hell. (Robert Bridges, he Testament of Beauty )

Origin:

1660s, from be- + dizen 'to dress' (1610s), especially, from late 18c, 'to dress finely, adorn,' originally 'to dress (a distaff) for spinning' (1520s), and evidently the verbal form of the first element in distaff. (Online Etymology Dictionary)

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. (Merriam-Webster)