cutify

English

WOTD – 30 September 2011

From Latin cutis (“skin”) and faciō (“make”).^[1]

cutify (third-person singular simple present cutifies, present participle cutifying, simple past and past participle cutified)

To form skin.^[1]
- 1898 May, T. L. MacDonald, “The Correction of Inveterate Hystero-Recto-Vesico-Ptosis by Laparotomy, and Implantation of the Uterus within the Abdominal Incision”, in The Hahnemannian Monthly‎^[2], volume 33, LaBarre Printing Company, page 281:
  A small area of the fundus protruded between the lips of the wound and was left to cutify.

To form skin

From cute +‎ -ify, perhaps with influence from beautify.

cutify (third-person singular simple present cutifies, present participle cutifying, simple past and past participle cutified)

(informal) To make cute.
- a. 2008, June Havoc, quoted in Alex Witchel, Girls Only: Sleepovers, Squabbles, Tuna Fish, and Other Facts of Family Life,^[3] Simon and Schuster (2008), →ISBN, page 110,
  “Vaudeville wouldn’t even eat in the same restaurants or stay in the same hotels as burlesque,” she was saying now. “There really were classes of people. And vaudeville was very proud, extremely proud. In Gypsy, burlesque was all cutified, not the way it really was, down and dirty, men with raw liver and milk bottles masturbating. […]”

To make cute

↑ ^1.0 ^1.1 William Dwight Whitney, The Century Dictionary: An Encyclopedic Lexicon of the English Language,^[1] The Century Company (1889), page 1416.