Prinked

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. Dressed or groomed oneself with meticulous attention to appearance and detail
2. Made oneself look smart and carefully turned out through particular attention to clothing and appearance
3. Prepared one's appearance with deliberate care and precision in dress or grooming

Etymology: "Prinked" is the past tense of "prink," and the verb has a tangled ancestry. One line of descent runs back to Old English "princ," meaning "a wink," and Middle English gave the verb the sense "to wink or signal with the eye." Its path to meaning "to dress up" is less certain: it may be an alteration, influenced by "primp," of "prank," meaning "to deck or adorn," which in turn may come from Middle Dutch "prinken," "to deck for show, parade in fine apparel." The Dutch branch fits the sense of showy display well. Related forms in Middle Dutch, German ("Prunk," "a show, parade, splendour") and Scandinavian languages all carry the idea of ostentatious show. So the word seems to have moved from a quick glance of the eye to a flourish of fine clothing and vanity, though the exact route between those two senses is not fully settled.

Synonyms: dressed up, preened, primped, groomed

Antonyms: disheveled, unkempt