Test Your Knowledge - and learn some interesting things along the way.

"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 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. The figurative use in our second quotation is also well-established. Such uses date to the late 18th century.

Examples

The children entertained themselves for hours with the contents of the old trunk, donning fancy dresses and bedizening themselves with jewelry and scarves.

"Critics love to bedizen her photographs in fancy theories, but [photographer Cindy] Sherman seldom overthinks. The most impressive aspect of her work may be how economically she orchestrates her three-ring circus of effects." - From a review by Richard B. Woodward in the Wall Street Journal, March 7, 2012