embellishment

embellish | American Dictionary

embellish
verb[ T ]
us/ɪmˈbel·ɪʃ/
to make something more beautiful or interesting by additions or details:
Many early building entrances were richly embellished.
If you embellish a story or statement, you add details that are not completely true in order to make it more interesting:
He couldn’t resist embellishing his account of the African safari.

Examples of embellish

embellish
Other attempts to embellish riding dress were doomed to failure.
The cultural development of a simply constructed and, therefore, more elastic language proceeds more productively than an old-fashioned, richly embellished one with minutely entangled forms.
They are cartoon-like versions of the animal: personified, embellished and layered with cultural symbolism.
Additionally, as much research has demonstrated, martial qualities have often been invented, embellished, and mythologized for political reasons.
This is not to excuse bogus originality designed to embellish plain fact.
To embellish building was once the noblest function of the fine arts; they were the indispensable components of great architecture.
As a result, families were attached to their property and to their province, and the countryside was greatly embellished.
The group appeared to play from a single line, embellishing this with heterophonous ornamentation.
A little fewer than a third of the speakers provided examples where they had been able to refine or embellish the narrative during planning time.
Although the story is embellished and varied in myriad guises, the basic outline remains essentially the same.
The story was embellished and retold in plays, ballads, and chapbooks.
In this case, oral sources over several generations had embellished actual events to create an edifying and dramatic, but entirely fictitious, tale of divine retribution.
In general, children who engage in rich, embellished reminiscing with their caregivers come to discuss their past experiences in more coherent and detailed ways.
The composer's genuine gift for illuminating and embellishing texts was instantly in evidence.
They fabricate, embellish, or restructure their recollections in order to pander to the pleasure, curiosity, and predilections of others.
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.