Prink
noun, verb ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 The act of adjusting one's dress or appearance; the act of sprucing oneself up.
"“Is my sash right; and does my hair look very bad?” said Meg, as she turned from the glass in Mrs. Gardiner’s dressing-room, after a prolonged prink."
- 1 to give a wink; to wink. dialectal, obsolete
- 2 To look, gaze.
- 3 To pre-drink. UK, humorous
- 4 put on special clothes to appear particularly appealing and attractive wordnet
- 5 To dress finely, primp, preen, spruce up.
"[…] by the Mass: You’ll make excellent Wives, Cuckold your Husbands immoderately: You mind nothing but prinking your selves up."
Show 2 more definitions
- 6 dress very carefully and in a finicky manner wordnet
- 7 To strut, put on pompous airs, be pretentious.
Example
More examples"“Is my sash right; and does my hair look very bad?” said Meg, as she turned from the glass in Mrs. Gardiner’s dressing-room, after a prolonged prink."
Etymology
From Middle English prinken (“to wink, signal with the eye”), from prinke, prinche (“a wink, twinkling of the eye, momentary gesture”), from Old English princ (“a wink”). More at pry.
Perhaps alteration (due to primp) of prank (“to deck, adorn”), from Middle English pranken (“to trim”), or from Middle Dutch prinken (“to deck for show, parade in fine apparel”) (from pronk (“show, display”) or from Middle Low German prunken (from prank (“display”)). Cognate with Middle Dutch pronken (“to flaunt”), German Prunk (“a show, parade, splendour”), Danish and Swedish prunk.
Contraction of pre-drink.
Related phrases
More for "prink"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.