Word.ws English Dictionary

dicky up

dicky up verb: to adorn, dress up, spruce up.

Verb

dicky up (third-person singular simple present dickies up, present participle dickying up, simple past and past participle dickied up)

  1. (Ireland, UK, slang) To adorn, dress up, spruce up.
    • The way they dicky up the corpse in the fancy funeral parlours today, with cosmetics and other tricks of the trade, and dressed in the best clothes, one would think they were trying to tell you what Our Lord said about the little daughter of Jairus, 'She is not dead but sleeping.'1998, Criostoir O'Flynn, There Is an Isle: A Limerick Boyhood, Boulder, C.O.: Mercier Press; Irish American Book Company, →ISBN, page 206
    • I go to Edges. Pick up a tin of white outdoor paint. Last one in the shop. 'First Holy Communions,' the man says, by way of explanation. 'People dickying up their properties.'2014, Ciara Geraghty, Now That I've Found You, London: Hodder, →ISBN, page 131

Forms of dicky up

third-person singular presentdickies up
present participledickying up
past participledickied up
pastdickied up

Words formed from dicky up

Questions about dicky up

What does dicky up mean?
Dicky up means to adorn, dress up, spruce up.
What part of speech is dicky up?
Dicky up is a verb.
What is the past tense of dicky up?
The past tense of dicky up is dickied up.

Words near dicky up in the dictionary

  1. dicky birds
  2. dicky bow
  3. dicky bows
  4. Dicky Sam
  5. Dicky Sams
  6. dicky up
  7. dicky-bird
  8. dicky-birds
  9. dickybird
  10. dickybirds
  11. dickying up

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dicky up (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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