spruce up

[sproos-uhp]

Origin

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noun

an act of cleaning up, refurbishing, renovating, or the like.

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Origin:
noun use of verb phrase spruce up

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Spruce up is always a great word to know.

So is lollapalooza. Does it mean:

an extraordinary or unusual thing, person, or event; an exceptional example or instance.

the offspring of a zebra and a donkey.

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Dictionary.com Unabridged

adjective

trim in dress or appearance; neat; smart; dapper.

verb (used with object)

to make spruce or smart (often followed by up): Spruce up the children before the company comes.

verb (used without object)

to make oneself spruce (usually followed by up).

Origin:
1580–90; obsolete spruce jerkin orig., jerkin made of spruce leather, i.e., leather imported from Prussia (see spruce¹), hence fine, smart, etc.

Related forms

spruce·ly, adverb

spruce·ness, noun

un·spruced, adjective

Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2012.
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Link To spruce up

Collins

World English Dictionary

spruce up

—vb
	(adverb) to make (oneself, a person, or thing) smart and neat

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009
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Etymonline

Word Origin & History

spruce

1594, from the adj. meaning "to make trim or neat," from spruce leather (1466, see spruce (n.)), which was used to make a popular style of jerkins in the 1400s that was considered smart-looking.

American Heritage

Idioms & Phrases

spruce up

Make neat and trim, as in She spruced up the chairs with new cushions. This idiom originated in the late 1500s as simply spruce but had acquired up by 1676.

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"Thus a man shall lead his life away here on the edge of the wilderness, on Indian Millinocket Stream, in a new world, far in the dark of a continent, and have a flute to play at evening here, while his strains echo to the stars, amid the howling of wolves; shall live, as it were, in the primitive age of the world, a primitive man. Yet he shall spend a sunny day, and in this century be my contemporary; perchance shall read some scattered leaves of literature, and sometimes talk with me. Why read history, then, if the ages and the generations are now? He lives three thousand years deep into time, an age not yet described by poets. Can you well go further back in history than this? Ay! ay!—for there turns up but now into the mouth of Millinocket Stream a still more ancient and primitive man, whose history is not brought down even to the former. In a bark vessel sewn with the roots of the spruce, with hornbeam paddles, he dips his way along. He is but dim and misty to me, obscured by the æons that lie between the bark canoe and the batteau. He builds no house of logs, but a wigwam of skins. He eats no hot bread and sweet cake, but musquash and moose meat and the fat of bears. He glides up the Millinocket and is lost to my sight, as a more distant and misty cloud is seen flitting by behind a nearer, and is lost in space. So he goes about his destiny, the red face of man."

-Henry David Thoreau

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