Word.ws English Dictionary

dizen

/ˈdɪzən/

dizen verb: to dress with flax for spinning.

Verb

dizen (third-person singular simple present dizens, present participle dizening, simple past and past participle dizened)

  1. (transitive) To dress with flax for spinning.
  2. (transitive) To dress with clothes; attire; deck; bedizen.
    • Like a tragedy queen he has dizen'd her out, / Or rather like tragedy giving a rout.1774, Oliver Goldsmith, “Retaliation”, in The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith, published 1906
  3. (UK, dialectal, transitive) To dress showily; adorn; dress out.
    • I tell you, these Englishwomen have either no life at all in them, or they're nothing but animal life. 'Gad, how they dizen themselves! They've no other use for their fingers. The wealth of this country's frightful!'1871, George Meredith, chapter XXXIX, in The Adventures of Harry Richmond

Forms of dizen

third-person singular presentdizens
present participledizening
past participledizened
pastdizened
alternative formdisen
alternative formdysyn
alternative formdizzen

Origin of dizen

From dialectal dize (“to put tow on a distaff”), from Middle English *disen, from Old English *disan, *disian, from *dise, *disen (“bunch of flax on a distaff”), from Proto-Germanic *disanō (“distaff”), of unknown origin, equivalent to dize + -en. Cognate with Saterland Frisian Diezene (“bundle of flax, distaff”), Middle Low German dise, disene (“distaff”).

Words formed from dizen

Questions about dizen

What does dizen mean?
Dizen means to dress with flax for spinning.
What part of speech is dizen?
Dizen is a verb.
How do you pronounce dizen?
Dizen is pronounced /ˈdɪzən/.
What is the past tense of dizen?
The past tense of dizen is dizened.

Words near dizen in the dictionary

  1. dizards
  2. dizdar
  3. dizdars
  4. dize
  5. dized
  6. dizen
  7. dizened
  8. dizening
  9. dizens
  10. dizes
  11. dizi

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dizen (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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