Word of the Day for Monday February 20, 2006 titivate

titivate \TIT-uh-vayt\, transitive and intransitive verb:To smarten up; to spruce up.

• It's easy to laugh at a book in which the heroine's husband says to her, "You look beautiful," and then adds, "So stop titivating yourself."-- Joyce Cohen, "review of To Be the Best, by Barbara Taylor Bradford," New York Times, July 31, 1988
• In The Idle Class, when Chaplin is titivating in a hotel room, the cloth on his dressing table rides up and down, caught in the same furious gusts.-- Peter Conrad, Modern Times, Modern Places

Titivate is perhaps from tidy + the quasi-Latin ending -vate. When the word originally came into the language, it was written tidivate or tiddivate. The noun form is titivation.