Word.ws English Dictionary

putting on frills

putting on frills is the present participle and gerund of put on frills.

Meaning of put on frills

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)

  1. (dated, idiomatic) 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

Questions about putting on frills

What is putting on frills the present participle and gerund of?
Putting on frills is the present participle and gerund of put on frills.

Words near putting on frills in the dictionary

  1. putting on
  2. putting on a brave face
  3. putting on a clinic
  4. putting on a pedestal
  5. putting on airs
  6. putting on frills
  7. putting on one's dancing shoes
  8. putting on one's own oxygen mask first
  9. putting on one's oxygen mask first
  10. putting on the block
  11. putting on the dog

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: putting on frills (page history and authors); 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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