window dressing

1. 1.

   a showy misrepresentation intended to conceal something unpleasant

   Synonymsfacade

   Broadermisrepresentation
2. 2.

   the decoration of shop windows

   Broaderdecoration

Questions about window dressing

What does window dressing mean?

window dressing means "a showy misrepresentation intended to conceal something unpleasant". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

What is another word for window dressing?

Close synonyms include facade. 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 window dressing a common word?

window dressing 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.