Word.ws English Dictionary

freshening up

freshening up is the present participle and gerund of freshen up.

Meaning of freshen up

Verb

freshen up (third-person singular simple present freshens up, present participle freshening up, simple past and past participle freshened up)

  1. (intransitive, reflexive) To wash or groom oneself in order to be more attractive.
    • Women spend longer than men at freshening up before going out.
  2. (transitive) To freshen, make fresh, revivify, make new.
    • After beating champions Chelsea 3-1 on Boxing Day, Arsenal boss Arsene Wenger made eight changes to his starting XI in an effort to freshen things up, with games against Birmingham and Manchester City to come in the next seven days.2010 December 29, Mark Vesty, “Wigan 2 - 2 Arsenal”, in BBC

Questions about freshening up

What is freshening up the present participle and gerund of?
Freshening up is the present participle and gerund of freshen up.

Words near freshening up in the dictionary

  1. freshened
  2. freshened up
  3. freshener
  4. fresheners
  5. freshening
  6. freshening up
  7. freshenings
  8. freshens
  9. freshens up
  10. fresher
  11. fresherdom

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: freshening up (page history and authors); freshen 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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Cite this entry: “freshening up.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/freshening_up. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.