put on frills
put on frills verb: to act in a pretentious or snobbish way.
Verb
put on frills (third-person singular simple present puts on frills, present participle putting on frills, simple past and past participle put on frills)
- To act in a pretentious or snobbish way.
- […] he put his head in again, and cussed me for putting on frills and trying to be better than him; and when I reckoned he was gone, he come back and put his head in again, and told me to mind about that school, because he was going to lay for me and lick me if I didn’t drop that.1884 December 10, Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], “Chapter 5”, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade) […], London: Chatto & Windus, […], →OCLC
- “She said we were really the only people on the ship they cared to know.”
“I shouldn’t have thought a missionary was such a big bug that he could afford to put on frills.”1921, W. Somerset Maugham, chapter 7, in The Trembling of a Leaf: Little Stories of the South Sea Islands, New York: George H. Doran, page 242
- Synonyms:
- give oneself airs, put on airs, show off
Synonyms of put on frills
Forms of put on frills
| third-person singular present | puts on frills |
|---|---|
| present participle | putting on frills |
| past participle | put on frills |
| past | put on frills |
Questions about put on frills
- What does put on frills mean?
- Put on frills means to act in a pretentious or snobbish way.
- What part of speech is put on frills?
- Put on frills is a verb.
- What is the past tense of put on frills?
- The past tense of put on frills is put on frills.
Words near put on frills in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: put on frills (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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