Embellish

 WORD OF THE DAY

embellish / verb / im-BELL-ish

Definition
1a: to make beautiful with ornamentation
1b: decorate
2a: to heighten the attractiveness of by adding decorative or fanciful details
2b: enhance

Examples
"Well, I've always wanted to write a children's book. This is just partly based on a story I used to tell Krishna, my daughter, when she was going to bed at night, but we just embellished it and embellished it."
— Padma Lakshmi, quoted in Bon Appétit, 27 May 2021

When putting flowers in a clear vase, embellish the water with fall crab apples, winter cranberries and slices of summer citrus.

— Marni Jameson, orlandosentinel.com, 17 Sep. 2021

Did You Know?

Like its synonyms adorn, ornament, and garnish, embellish means to make something beautiful by the addition of a decorative or fanciful feature. Traditionally, the word is used specifically to stress the addition of superfluous or adventitious ornament, as in "The printer embellished the page with a floral border." Embellish differs from its synonyms, however, in that it is sometimes used in a euphemistic way to refer to the inclusion of details that are not necessarily true to make a story sound more appealing. The word derives via Middle English from the Anglo-French verb embelir, from en- and bel ("beautiful").