Prink

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. To dress or adorn oneself with careful attention to appearance and fine details
2. To spruce up one's appearance through meticulous grooming and stylish arrangement
3. To primp and make oneself look neat and attractive through deliberate personal preparation

Etymology: The verb "prink" has a tangled ancestry, and the sources offer more than one possibility. One strand runs back to Old English "princ," meaning "a wink," which gave Middle English "prinken," "to wink or signal with the eye." Over time the sense moved from a flicker of the eyelid to a fussing over one's appearance, so a word once about a brief glance came to mean dressing up. The other strand points toward the idea of display. It may be an alteration, influenced by "primp," of "prank," meaning "to deck or adorn," which appears in Middle English as "pranken," "to trim." Alternatively it may come from Middle Dutch "prinken," "to deck for show, parade in fine apparel." That Dutch word belongs to a family that includes German "Prunk," meaning a show or splendour, and Swedish and Danish "prunk," all of which suggest the notion of showing off. A more playful, and far less likely, explanation is that "prink" is a contraction of "pre-drink," a claim that sometimes circulates and is not well supported.

Synonyms: primp, groom, preen, dress up