Word.ws English Dictionary

dowdy up

dowdy up verb: to make something appear plain and unattractive.

Verb

dowdy up (third-person singular simple present dowdies up, present participle dowdying up, simple past and past participle dowdied up)

  1. (idiomatic, transitive) To make something appear plain and unattractive.
    • I don't want one ounce of sex appeal emanating from me. I find flip-flops that are too big, and roll up the hem. Hell, I'm even going to dowdy up my hair.2016, Violet Vaughn, Rush for Love

Forms of dowdy up

third-person singular presentdowdies up
present participledowdying up
past participledowdied up
pastdowdied up

Questions about dowdy up

What does dowdy up mean?
Dowdy up means to make something appear plain and unattractive.
What part of speech is dowdy up?
Dowdy up is a verb.
What is the past tense of dowdy up?
The past tense of dowdy up is dowdied up.

Words near dowdy up in the dictionary

  1. Dowdings
  2. Dowdle
  3. Dowdles
  4. dowds
  5. dowdy
  6. dowdy up
  7. dowdying
  8. dowdying up
  9. dowdyish
  10. dowdyism
  11. Dowdys

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dowdy 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.

Last updated:

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