🥇 To cover with gold ✨ To add extras

to goldplate

8.4

To add unneeded costly features to a product or project that do not help its main purpose

verb
/ˈɡoʊldˌpleɪt/

Jargon

: embellecer

It's a mistake to goldplate the product specifications just to impress clients, as it can lead to increased costs without real benefits.

Examples

The design team decided to goldplate the app with flashy new features to attract investors, even though it wasn't necessary.
So what would happen if a company could 'goldplate' costs which were actually 35 percent of gross revenues, say, up to 40 percent?

Blog text (15)
Rather than focusing on functionality, the developers chose to goldplate the software with unnecessary graphics that slowed down performance.

Synonyms

to gold-plate

vsto goldplate

Literature

8.2

To add extra features or rules that make something costly and difficult

is the unhyphenated or standard form used in business and software contexts

Antonyms

to simplify

99 2.5

Make something easier to understand or use

to streamline

41 4.1

Make a process or system simpler and more efficient

How Excessive

bloat

Specialized

3 7.6

to goldplate

Jargon

8.4

to enhance

424 4.0

to add

∞ 1.0

Surface Forms

goldplate infinitive

goldplated past

goldplated past participle

goldplating present participle

goldplates third person singular

Morphology

goldplate = gold + plate (semi-transparent) = gold + plate

The business/engineering sense is a metaphorical extension of the literal 'gold' + 'plate' idea (superficial embellishment), so the morphological structure is clear but the specialized figurative meaning may not be obvious to all learners.

Etymology

Goldplate is also used in business as a picture: think of covering a plain thing with a thin layer of gold to make it look fancier. A helpful way to remember this is that to goldplate a product is to add showy, costly features that may look good but do not make it much better.