bedizen

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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.




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