Word of the Day - Bedizen

Subject: bedizen: M-W's Word of the Day

The Word of the Day for June 6 is:

bedizen \bih-DYE-zen\ verb

: to dress or adorn gaudily

Example sentence:

"Adorned by minarets and spires and bedizened by more than a million lights, Coney Island embodied what has been called the 'architecture of exhilaration.'" (Blaine Harden, _New York Times_, August 28, 1999)

Did you know? "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 verb "disen," which meant "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.