jewelry

Formsjewelries, jewelrying, jewelried

1. 1
   personal ornamentsnoununcountable

   Personal ornaments taken as a group, such as rings, necklaces, brooches, and bracelets, made of precious metals and sometimes set with gemstones.

   The thieves took cash and jewelry but left the paintings on the walls.

   Handmade jewelry at the boutique costs far more than similar pieces at the mall.

   Similarjewels

   Note

   The word is jewel plus the collective ending -ery, inherited through Middle English juelrye from Old French juelerye, so it names ornaments as one mass: you own a lot of jewelry, or a piece of it. American English writes jewelry; British spelling is jewellery, with a doubled l and an extra e. Slang has its own words for it, from bling to the Cockney tomfoolery, shortened to tom.

2. 2
   make ornamentsverbrareintransitive

   To make jewelry, such as rings, necklaces, and bracelets.

   He was using all the arts of barbering, livery stabling, jewelrying, oratorying, and tailoring.

   1897, Ephraim Cutter, “Fatty Ills and Their Masquerades”

   Note

   A rare verb that turns up almost only as the -ing form naming a trade, lined up with other occupations. Ephraim Cutter in The Medical Age (1897) lists barbering, livery stabling, jewelrying. Hugh M. Addington (1991) pairs farming, poultrying and jewelrying. Use it in that list-of-callings pattern if at all. Elsewhere, "make jewelry" is the safe choice.

3. 3
   decorateverbrareintransitive

   To adorn oneself or another with jewelry, or to make something into jewelry.

   Note

   Where the trade verb lives in the -ing form, the adorning sense surfaces as the past participle used like an adjective. Helen Khal's The Woman Artist in Lebanon (1988) praises "jewelried silver and gold", meaning metal worked into ornament. Finite uses such as "she jewelried the vase" would sound strange to most readers. Jeweled or bejeweled is the ordinary word for something decorated with gems.

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