Meaning & use
beautify
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Meanings
verbtransitive
To improve the look of a place or object by adding decoration or removing ugly features.
Grammar: Takes an object: they beautified the park.
Patterns
- beautify something
- beautify something with something
Volunteers planted flowers to beautify the empty lot.
The city spent money to beautify the main square before the festival.
They tried to beautify the old fence with a coat of bright paint.
verbtransitiveold-fashioned
To make a person look more attractive, for example with makeup, clothes or grooming.
Grammar: Takes an object, which may be a reflexive pronoun: she beautified herself.
Patterns
- beautify yourself
- beautify someone
She spent an hour beautifying herself before the wedding.
The salon promises to beautify every client who walks in.
Women in the ancient story beautified their hair with oils.
Word forms
| third person singular | beautifies |
|---|---|
| past tense | beautified |
| past participle | beautified |
| -ing form | beautifying |
Common combinations
- beautify the city
- A new program aims to beautify the city with trees and murals.
- beautify a neighborhood
- Residents worked together to beautify the neighborhood last summer.
- beautify the surroundings
- Fresh paint helped beautify the surroundings of the school.
- beautification project
- The town approved a beautification project for the riverfront.
- beautify with flowers
- They beautify the entrance with flowers every spring.
Synonyms and how they differ
- decorate
- Decorate means to add ornaments or paint, and it need not make something truly beautiful, whereas beautify aims at real improvement.
- adorn
- Adorn is more literary and suggests adding ornaments to something, usually jewelry or fine details, to make it look grand.
- embellish
- Embellish suggests adding extra details to something that already exists, and it is also used for exaggerating a story.
- prettify
- Prettify is informal and can sound slightly mocking, suggesting a shallow or superficial improvement.
Opposites
Word family
- beauty noun
- the quality of being very pleasing to look at
- beautiful adjective
- very pleasing to look at or experience
- beautification noun
- the act of making a place or thing look better
- beautifully adverb
- in a very pleasing or excellent way
- beautician noun
- a person whose job is to give beauty treatments
Commonly confused: beautify or beatify?
beautify vs beatify
Beatify is a religious term meaning to declare a dead person blessed as a step to sainthood. It is not about making something look pretty.
Practice
The council hopes to ___ the bleak railway underpass with painted murals.
Choose one answer.
Beautify means to make a place look more attractive. Beatify is a religious term, bewilder means to confuse, and benefit does not take this meaning with murals.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “beautify”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.