Word.ws English Dictionary

spruce up

spruce up verb: to dress or arrange smartly, elegantly, and neatly; to smarten.

Verb

spruce up (third-person singular simple present spruces up, present participle sprucing up, simple past and past participle spruced up)

  1. (idiomatic) To dress or arrange smartly, elegantly, and neatly; to smarten.
  2. (idiomatic) To refresh, revamp; to freshen or improve something, especially its appearance.
    • Fresh paint and some new curtains would do a lot to spruce up this dark room.
    • Hu Yaobang was officially rehabilitated on the ninetieth anniversary of his birth in 2005 and his mausoleum in China Youth League City (Gongqingcheng) in Jiangxi province was spruced up.2010, Bruce Gilley, “Deng Xiaoping and His Successors (1976 to the present)”, in William A. Joseph, editor, Politics in China: An Introduction, Oxford University Press, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, page 114

Synonyms of spruce up

Forms of spruce up

third-person singular presentspruces up
present participlesprucing up
past participlespruced up
pastspruced up

Questions about spruce up

What does spruce up mean?
Spruce up means to dress or arrange smartly, elegantly, and neatly; to smarten.
What part of speech is spruce up?
Spruce up is a verb.
What is the past tense of spruce up?
The past tense of spruce up is spruced up.

Words near spruce up in the dictionary

  1. spruce pines
  2. spruce siskin
  3. spruce siskins
  4. spruce tip
  5. spruce tips
  6. spruce up
  7. spruced
  8. spruced up
  9. spruceless
  10. sprucely
  11. sprucen

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: spruce 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-spruce up.ogg.

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