Word.ws English Dictionary

beautifying

beautifying is the present participle and gerund of beautify.

Meaning of beautify

Verb

beautify (third-person singular simple present beautifies, present participle beautifying, simple past and past participle beautified)

  1. (transitive) To make beautiful; to increase the beauty of.
    • […] there is an vpstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you:1592, Robert Greene, Greene's Groats-Worth of Wit, London: William Wright, “Robertoes Tale”
  2. (intransitive, rare) To become beautiful.
    • […] it must be a Prospect pleasing to God himself, to see his Creation for ever beautifying in his Eyes, and drawing nearer to him, by greater Degrees of Resemblance.1719, Joseph Addison, “Upon the Immortality of the Soul”, in Maxims, Observations, and Reflections, London: E. Curll, page 88
  3. (intransitive, rare) To make oneself beautiful.
    • She’d felt silly when she first put cucumbers on her eyes (to diminish puffiness), or oatmeal on her face (to cleanse the pores and absorb excess oils), or egg yolks in her hair (to make it shine). Her use of groceries had even made my mother laugh, then wonder if she should start to beautify.2002, Alice Sebold, chapter 13, in The Lovely Bones, London: Picador, page 156
  4. Synonym of pretty-print.
    Antonyms:
    minify, uglify

Noun

beautifying (countable and uncountable, plural beautifyings)

  1. The act of beautifying.
    Synonyms:
    beautification

Adjective

beautifying (comparative more beautifying, superlative most beautifying)

  1. That beautifies; tending to make beautiful.
    • When thou present’st me, Gellia, with an Hare,
      Marcus, thou say’st, ’twill make the seven Days fair.
      If Hare be such a beautifying Meat,
      Thou ne’er of one in all thy Life didst eat.1695, Henry Killigrew, transl., Epigrams of Martial, London: Henry Bonwicke, Book 5, Epigram 32, pp. 117-118
    • It evidently surpassed his majesty’s comprehension how any sober-minded and sensible individual could entertain the least possible objection to so beautifying an operation [i.e. being tattooed].1846, Herman Melville, chapter 30, in Typee, London: John Murray, published 1847, page 243

Synonyms of beautifying

Forms of beautifying

Noun
pluralbeautifyings
Adjective
comparativemore beautifying
superlativemost beautifying

Questions about beautifying

What does beautifying mean?
Beautifying means the act of beautifying.
What is beautifying the present participle and gerund of?
Beautifying is the present participle and gerund of beautify.
What part of speech is beautifying?
Beautifying can be a noun or an adjective.
What is the plural of beautifying?
The plural of beautifying is beautifyings.

Words near beautifying in the dictionary

  1. beautifully
  2. beautifulness
  3. beautifulnesses
  4. beautifuls
  5. beautify
  6. beautifying
  7. beautifyings
  8. beautihood
  9. beautiless
  10. beautilessness
  11. beautilitarian

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: beautifying (page history and authors); beautify (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “beautifying.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/beautifying. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.