spice something up

spice | American Dictionary

spice
noun[ C/U ]
us/spɑɪs/
a flavoring for food made from part of a plant, such as its fruit, seeds, or root, usually dried and often made into a powder:
[ C ]Cinnamon, ginger, and cloves are all spices.
[ U ]This curry needs a little more spice.
Spice can also mean excitement or interest:
[ U ]"Variety is the spice of life" is a common expression.

Examples of spice

spice
Although there would be sufficient hardships and dangers and problems to give spice to life, there would be no utterly destructive and apparently vindictive evil.
When he has nothing more exciting to write about than his own health, he spices the letters up with biblical jocularities.
The string-modelled clank sounds are used infrequently in the piece, like an exotic, strong spice that could overpower if your hand slipped.
Diversity after all is the spice of life.
Those ingredients reported the most included fruit, seeds, grains, feed and soybeans for feed, vegetables, milk and milk products, herbs, spices and extracts.
With all the tumult and protest that daily lives were experiencing in the 1960s, the language teaching profession needed some spice and verve.
The latter grow flue-cured and burley tobacco as their principal crops, though most also grow maize, other food crops, tree crops or spices.
The exposition generally proceeds at the right pace, and is occasionally spiced with amusing or personal examples.
The answer to this next question may be ' 'because variety is the spice of life' '.
They have their special set of spices, of which salt and pepper are central.
That "variety," that "difference," that "dash of spice" is, precisely, ethnicity.
He was singularly innocent of the political manoeuvring which provides for some the spice of academic life.
These merchants generally traded in goods which could be kept for long periods of time and which were often brought from overseas, such as spices.
The map itself, traversed by rivers and peppered with icons representing grain, cattle, or spices, offers a harvest of possibility for imperial and commercial exploitation.
The irregular façades can be seen as a search for dissonance or tension, an element of spice to add to the basic mix.
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These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.