Word.ws English Dictionary

betterfy

betterfy verb: to make better.

Verb

betterfy (third-person singular simple present betterfies, present participle betterfying, simple past and past participle betterfied)

  1. (US, nonstandard, rare, slang, transitive) to make better
    • The kind-hearted Clio encouraged her hopes, and recounted sundry histories which she had heard from their forest customers, of the betterfying effects of the handsome locations round Natchez.1857, Frances Trollope, Lynch Law; or, the Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw, page 25
    • And so the citizens of Fort Wayne desiring to “beautify and betterfy” their home town looked about for a leader and found one in Prof. Charles Zueblin, a civic evangelist who had stirred Grand Rapids in a somewhat similar movement about a year before.1909, The Civic League Bulletin of Newport, R.I., volume 4, number 1, page 5

Forms of betterfy

third-person singular presentbetterfies
present participlebetterfying
past participlebetterfied
pastbetterfied

Origin of betterfy

From better + -fy.

Questions about betterfy

What does betterfy mean?
Betterfy means to make better.
What part of speech is betterfy?
Betterfy is a verb.
What is the past tense of betterfy?
The past tense of betterfy is betterfied.

Words near betterfy in the dictionary

  1. betterers
  2. betterest
  3. bettereth
  4. betterfied
  5. betterfies
  6. betterfy
  7. betterfying
  8. betterhood
  9. Betteridge
  10. Betteridge's Law
  11. Betteridge's law of headlines

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: betterfy (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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