Word of the DayMonday, February 20, 2006

titivate

\TIT-uh-vayt\ , transitive and intransitive verb:
1.
To smarten up; to spruce up.
Quotes:
It's easy to laugh at a book in which the heroine's husband says to her, "You look beautiful," and then adds, "So stop titivating yourself."
-- Joyce Cohen, review of To Be the Best, by Barbara Taylor Bradford, New York Times, July 31, 1988
In The Idle Class, when Chaplin is titivating in a hotel room, the cloth on his dressing table rides up and down, caught in the same furious gusts.
-- Peter Conrad, Modern Times, Modern Places
Origin:
Titivate is perhaps from tidy + the quasi-Latin ending -vate. When the word originally came into the language, it was written tidivate or tiddivate. The noun form is titivation.
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