Bedizen means to dress or to adorn gaudily. Much like a fashion show gone wrong. "Bedizen" doesn’t have the flashy history you might expect — its roots
lie in the rather quiet art of spinning thread. In times past, the
spinning process began with the placement of fibers (such as flax) on an
implement called a "distaff"; the fibers were then drawn out from the
distaff and twisted into thread. "Bedizen" descends from the older, now
obsolete, verb "disen," which meant "to dress a distaff with flax" and
which came to English by way of Middle Dutch. The spelling of "disen"
eventually became "dizen," and its meaning expanded to cover the
"dressing up" of things other than distaffs. In the mid-17th century,
English speakers began using "bedizen" with the same meaning. The
figurative use in the second quotation is also well-established. Such
uses date to the late 18th century.
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