burnish

Other forms of burnish

plural

burnishes·

past tense

burnished·

present participle

burnishing·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about burnish

What does burnish mean?

burnish means "the property of being smooth and shiny". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in burnish?

burnish has 2 syllables: bur-nish. The stress falls on "bur". In IPA it is /ˈbɝnɪʃ/.

What is another word for burnish?

Close synonyms include polish, gloss, glossiness, buff, furbish. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is burnish a common word?

burnish is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.