Word.ws English Dictionary

dress-up

dress-up noun: a child's game of putting on different clothes and pretending to be different people.

Noun

dress-up (uncountable)

  1. (informal) A child's game of putting on different clothes and pretending to be different people.
    • One day, I happened to catch a glimpse of my daughter Annie, age three, playing dress-up with her pals at the family day care program she attends twice a week. Each child had a hat on his or her head and was pretending to be a circus clown.1995, Working Mother: The Power of Dress-up, volume 18, number 2, page 48

Origin of dress-up

Deverbal from dress up.

Words formed from dress-up

Phrases with dress-up

Questions about dress-up

What does dress-up mean?
Dress-up means a child's game of putting on different clothes and pretending to be different people.
What part of speech is dress-up?
Dress-up is a noun.

Words near dress-up in the dictionary

  1. dress-down Friday
  2. dress-goods
  3. dress-out
  4. dress-shirted
  5. dress-suited
  6. dress-up
  7. dress-up game
  8. dress-up games
  9. dress-up parties
  10. dress-up party
  11. dressability

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dress-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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