Word of the Day for Monday February 20, 2006 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," [1]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, [2]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. References 1. http://www.nytimes.com/ 2. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/037540113X/ref=nosim/lexico Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation http://dictionary.reference.com/search?r=9&q=titivate