gild
1 Americanverb (used with object)
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to coat with gold, gold leaf, or a gold-colored substance.
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to give a bright, pleasing, or specious aspect to.
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Archaic. to make red, as with blood.
idioms
noun
verb
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to cover with or as if with gold
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to adorn unnecessarily something already beautiful
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to praise someone inordinately
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to give a falsely attractive or valuable appearance to
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archaic to smear with blood
noun
Other Word Forms
- gildable adjective
- gilder noun
- gildsman noun
Etymology
Origin of gild
1300–50; Middle English gilden, Old English -gyldan; akin to gold
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Kate sat near the stage in a chipped, gilded plaster box that once enshrined New York society’s elite.
From Literature
But now a cadre of bureaucrats in Paris’s gilded Quai d’Orsay are ditching their carefully worded communiqués in favor of a stream of real-time X posts that mix self-mockery and sarcasm…in English.
We crossed the grounds, entered the castle doors, now gilded gold, marched up a grand golden staircase, and down a long corridor to a large golden door with gold handles.
From Literature
As an aide hovers, reminding Mr. Walesa that he must depart soon for his next appointment, I ask about a gilded statuette that sits on a table next to him.
The chumminess among some of the gilded people in Epstein’s circle has landed at an acutely populist moment.
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
