🎀 To make beautiful 🏅 To give an award 💻 To add code

to decorate

5 7.7

To change how a function or class works by adding a small extra function around it

verb
/ˈdɛkəˌreɪt/

Specialized

: decorar

decorating cakes
decorating your home
decorating her room

Examples

And I will see you tomorrow where I'm going to be helping Mark decorate his flat.
Later that day, the girls and I made cupcakes, and they had a great time decorating them all.

Blog text (20)
At home, Connie decorated her bracelet with glitter glue.

Fiction book (1995)
CallerInfo attributes are specifically designed to decorate the optional parameters of a method, which can then be used by the .NET runtime to inject the caller information.

Blog text (26)
In programming, you can decorate a function with additional functionality using a decorator.
To enhance the behavior of a method, programmers often decorate it with special annotations.
When you decorate a class, you modify its methods to add new features.

Antonyms

to disable

87 3.5

Make a device or feature stop working

How Modified

override

58 6.7

to extend

Specialized

10 6.2

to decorate

Specialized

5 7.7

to augment

52 5.3

to wrap

729 1.0

Surface Forms

decorate infinitive

decorated past

decorated past participle

decorating present participle

decorates third person singular

Morphology

decorate = decor (semi-transparent) = decor + ate

The programming sense is a domain-specific metaphorical extension of 'to add ornament/feature'; the morphological structure is the same but the meaning is specialized.

Etymology

Decorate in programming is a modern, metaphorical use of the same Latin root decorare 'to make beautiful', and a decorator is like an ornament placed around a function that changes how it works. A helpful way to remember this is to imagine putting a decoration around a function to add new behavior.