Word.ws English Dictionary

spiff up

spiff up verb: to decorate or otherwise make more attractive.

Verb

spiff up (third-person singular simple present spiffs up, present participle spiffing up, simple past and past participle spiffed up)

  1. (idiomatic, slang, transitive) To decorate or otherwise make more attractive.
    • He was all spiffed up, this chap, decked out in a spotless white shirt and a bow tie.2008, Preeta Samarasan, Evening is the Whole Day, Fourth Estate, page 22

Forms of spiff up

third-person singular presentspiffs up
present participlespiffing up
past participlespiffed up
pastspiffed up

Questions about spiff up

What does spiff up mean?
Spiff up means to decorate or otherwise make more attractive.
What part of speech is spiff up?
Spiff up is a verb.
What is the past tense of spiff up?
The past tense of spiff up is spiffed up.

Words near spiff up in the dictionary

  1. Spiewaks
  2. Spiez
  3. spife
  4. spifes
  5. spiff
  6. spiff up
  7. spiffed
  8. spiffed up
  9. spiffier
  10. spiffies
  11. spiffiest

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: spiff 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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-spiff up.ogg.

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