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dizen'd

Archaic Terms
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Dizened means dressed, decorated, or adorned—often with an implication of excessive, artificial, or showy ornament.

Detailed Definition
An archaic form of dizened, dizen’d describes someone or something that has been dressed up or embellished. The word can be neutral, but it often carries a mocking suggestion that the adornment is gaudy, overdone, or meant to conceal an unattractive reality. In poetry, it may be used ironically to contrast outward display with what lies beneath it.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Jonathan Swift’s A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed, the speaker describes Corinna after she has laboriously replaced her cosmetics, artificial hair, false eye, padding, and other accessories: “Corinna in the Morning dizen’d, Who sees, will spew; who smells, be poison’d.” Here, dizen’d means “dressed up” or “made presentable.” Swift uses the term sarcastically: Corinna’s morning beautification is not presented as elegant adornment, but as a grotesque reconstruction of her appearance.
Additional Notes
Dizen’d is a contracted spelling of dizened, with the apostrophe marking the omitted syllable in -ed. The verb dizen was especially used for dressing, decking out, or ornamenting a person, sometimes with an implication of finery or artificial display. Related terms include adorned, decked, arrayed, and bedecked. Unlike the more neutral adorned, dizen’d can suggest excessive or tasteless decoration. In Swift’s poem, the word supports the satire: Corinna’s beauty depends on removable artificial items, so being “dizen’d” means being assembled into a public-facing appearance rather than naturally beautiful.
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