embellish
/ɪmˈbɛlɪʃ/ verb
Forms embellishes embellishing embellished
- verb To make more beautiful and attractive by adding ornamentation; to decorate. “The old book cover was embellished with golden letters”
- verb (by extension) To enhance by adding something not strictly integral or necessary.
- verb To make something sound or look better or more acceptable than it is in reality; to distort, embroider, or even misrepresent or lie. “to embellish a story, the truth”
Synonyms
adorn beautify decorate deck grace ornament prettify embroider pad lard aggrandize aggrandise blow up dramatize dramatise fancify
Etymology
From Middle English embelishen, from Old French embellir, from em- + bel.
Webster’s 1913
- verb To make beautiful or elegant by ornaments; to decorate; to adorn; as, to embellish a book with pictures, a garden with shrubs and flowers, a narrative with striking anecdotes, or style with metaphors.
Etymology [OE. embelisen, embelisshen, F. embellir; pref. em- (L. in) + bel, beau, beautiful. See Beauty.]
Sources: Wiktionary · WordNet 3.0 · Webster’s 1913 — from the Wiktionary entry “embellish”, CC BY-SA 4.0. Details