Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- transitive verb To make smooth or glossy by rubbing; polish.
- transitive verb To rub with a tool that serves especially to smooth or polish.
- transitive verb To improve or make more impressive.
- noun A smooth glossy finish or appearance; luster.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun Polish; hence, gloss; brightness; luster.
- To cause to glow or become resplendent.
- To polish by friction; make smooth and lustrous: as, to
burnish steel. - To grow, as a child; thrive; flourish; become fat and sleek; hence, to become bright or brilliant; show conspicuously.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun The effect of burnishing; gloss; brightness; luster.
- transitive verb To cause to shine; to make smooth and bright; to polish; specifically, to polish by rubbing with something hard and smooth.
- transitive verb a machine for smoothing and polishing by compression, as in making paper collars.
- intransitive verb To shine forth; to brighten; to become smooth and glossy, as from swelling or filling out; hence, to grow large.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- verb transitive To make smooth or shiny by rubbing; to
polish ; toshine .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- verb polish and make shiny
- noun the property of being smooth and shiny
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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Nice to see a potential American leader able to once again burnish America’s image abroad. —
Obama’s High-Powered Ride to the Airport - The Caucus Blog - NYTimes.com 2008
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The editors accuse Scott of "shamelessly exploiting the tragedy of a family of a severely disabled young woman" in order to "burnish" his pro-life bona fides.
Rick Scott, Florida Gubernatorial Candidate, Assailed By St. Petersburg Times In Editorial 2010
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This past week, Limbaugh insisted that the Obama White House would use the catastrophe in Haiti to "burnish" the president's standing and credibility "with the black community, in the both light-skinned and dark-skinned black community, in this country."
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The editors accuse Scott of "shamelessly exploiting the tragedy of a family of a severely disabled young woman" in order to "burnish" his pro-life bona fides.
Rick Scott, Florida Gubernatorial Candidate, Assailed By St. Petersburg Times In Editorial 2010
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So, very clearly in the political sense, given that this was during an election year and part of an effort to kind of burnish up his foreign policy credentials, it was interesting to me that he spent so much time in Israel, that he did make that statement in Sderot, which is one of the reasons that Israel is now in the Gaza is to stop those incoming missiles.
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So it definitely -- it just frees her up to -- to not only enhance her name recognition, which is already really high, but also to kind of burnish her brand, because she is still so much a figure that, you know, conservatives like and what she needs to do now, clearly, is become more of an independent -- a figure that Independents can like.
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Inside the word "burnish," by a neat linguistic accident, lies the word "burn" — the copper shines because of the burning heat of the sun, so to speak.
Emperor of Nostalgia Coetzee, J.M. 2002
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RadioShack would "burnish" its brand, add more private-label programs, and continue to build its wireless business under a new go-to-market strategy that was shared with investors during a rare earnings call by chairman/CEO Julian Day.
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Ann Coulter is jealous of the attention Rush Limbaugh has been getting since making his comment about the Obama administration wanting to exploit the Haitian tragedy to "burnish" his credentials with the black community.
Raw Story 2010
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Ann Coulter is jealous of the attention Rush Limbaugh has been getting since making his comment about the Obama administration wanting to exploit the Haitian tragedy to "burnish" his credentials with the black community.
Raw Story 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word burnish
"Close to the shore, patches of vapour, soot-black but with the burnish and consistency of agate, visibly solid and palpable, were trying to rise one above another over the sea in ever wider tiers, so that the highest of them, poised on the top of the twisted column and overreaching the centre of gravity of those which had hitherto supported them, seemed on the point of bringing down in ruin this lofty structure already half-way up the sky, and precipitating it into the sea."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 523 of the Modern Library paperback edition
April 26, 2008