spruce
/spɹuːs/ verb C2- To arrange neatly; tidy up.
- To make oneself spruce (neat and elegant in appearance).
- To tease.
He/she/it spruces · Past spruced · Past participle spruced · -ing form sprucing
Verb forms
- Base form
- spruce
- He/she/it
- spruces
- Past
- spruced
- Past participle
- spruced
- -ing form
- sprucing
Phrasal verbs and expressions
From the library
Beyond it was a hill, green and feathery with spruce and fir; there was a gap in it where the gray gable end of the little house she had seen from the other side of the Lake of Shining Waters was visible.
Down in the valley the path came out to the main road and then it was just up the spruce hill to the school.
Bell’s spruce grove over the hill and across his big pasture field.
Bell’s spruce grove as usual, fully intending to stay only long enough to “pick a chew.” But spruce groves are seductive and yellow nuts of gum beguiling; they picked and loitered and strayed; and as usual the first thing that recalled them to a sense of the flight of time was Jimmy Glover shouting from the top of a patriarchal old spruce “Master’s coming.”
Other matches
Learn spruce in real texts
With a free account, hover any word in the library for its meaning, hear it read aloud, save words for review timed to your memory, and see how much of each book you already know.