Dizen
verb ·Uncommon ·College level
Definitions
- 1 To dress with flax for spinning. transitive
- 2 dress up garishly and tastelessly wordnet
- 3 To dress with clothes; attire; deck; bedizen. transitive
"Like a tragedy queen he has dizen'd her out, / Or rather like tragedy giving a rout."
- 4 To dress showily; adorn; dress out. UK, dialectal, transitive
"I tell you, these Englishwomen have either no life at all in them, or they're nothing but animal life. 'Gad, how they dizen themselves! They've no other use for their fingers. The wealth of this country's frightful!'"
Example
More examples"Like a tragedy queen he has dizen'd her out, / Or rather like tragedy giving a rout."
Etymology
From dialectal dize (“to put tow on a distaff”), from Middle English *disen, from Old English *disan, *disian, from *dise, *disen (“bunch of flax on a distaff”), from Proto-Germanic *disanō (“distaff”), of unknown origin, equivalent to dize + -en. Cognate with Saterland Frisian Diezene (“bundle of flax, distaff”), Middle Low German dise, disene (“distaff”).
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.