dress down

Questions about dress down

What does dress down mean?

dress down means "censure severely or angrily". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

What is another word for dress down?

Close synonyms include call on the carpet, take to task, rebuke, rag, trounce. 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.

What is the opposite of dress down?

The recorded antonyms are dress up.

Is dress down a common word?

dress down is banded "Uncommon" — turns up in careful writing rather than conversation. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.