adorn.

1. To make a person or thing more attractive by adding or serving as decoration.

2. To add beauty, interest, or distinction to something through language, qualities, or personal presence.

Use it for

Words that belong together

• adorn a room with flowers
• adorn a dress with embroidery
• paintings adorn the walls
• be richly adorned
• adorned with jewels

On the page

She adorned the plain cuffs with a narrow band of silver thread.

Small carved birds adorned the gate, their painted wings worn pale by the weather.

For the ceremony, he wore a cloak adorned with tiny brass bells.

The storyteller adorned the account with jokes and scraps of song.

Her wit adorned an otherwise solemn speech without weakening its argument.

Usage notes

Transitive verb. Base: adorn; third-person singular: adorns; simple past: adorned; past participle: adorned; present participle: adorning; future: will adorn. Patterns: adorn something with something; something is adorned with something; decorative objects adorn a surface. In the last pattern, the subject is the decoration, not the person arranging it. Figurative uses take the same regular forms. Adornment is the related noun. Do not confuse adorn with adore, meaning to love or admire deeply. Register: literary. Commonness: moderately common in descriptive and edited writing; less common in casual conversation (dictionary-informed qualitative editorial estimate; not a measured frequency).