Did You Know?
Like its synonyms "adorn," "ornament," and "garnish," "embellish" means to make something beautiful by the addition of a decorative or fanciful feature. Traditionally, the word is used specifically to stress the addition of superfluous or adventitious ornament, as in "the printer embellished the page with a floral border." "Embellish" differs from its synonyms, however, in that it is sometimes used in a euphemistic way (as in our example sentence) to refer to the inclusion of details that are not necessarily true to make a story sound more appealing. The word derives via Middle English from the Anglo-French verb "embelir," from "en-" and "bel" ("beautiful").
