Zhoosh

To fix something up with a quick, stylish touch, as in zhoosh your hair; a Polari word, also spelled zhuzh, now in mainstream English dictionaries.

Zhoosh means to fix something up with a quick, stylish touch: fluff the hair, roll the sleeves, move the cushions, add a squeeze of lemon. You zhoosh your fringe before a date, you zhoosh up a dull outfit with a scarf, and a room that has been zhooshed looks the same, only better. It is a Polari word, and today one of the few that the whole English-speaking world has picked up.

The spelling is a mess, which tells you it lived in the mouth long before anyone wrote it down: zhoosh, zhuzh, zoosh and even josh all appear. Americans now mostly write zhuzh.

Where it comes from

Nobody knows for sure. Green's Dictionary of Slang offers two ideas: an echo of the sound of someone rushing about, or the Romani zhouzho, clean, neat. Its earliest example comes from Peter Burton's 1970 typescript on the language of West End gay men, where "a zhooshy quean is a grand quean". In old Polari the word did more than one job: as a noun, zhoosh meant clothes or ornamentation, and zhooshy meant showy or flashy.

That is the spirit of the word. To zhoosh is to add a bit of glamour, a bit of drama, the small extra that turns ordinary into fabulous.

How it is used today

Unlike most Polari, zhoosh did not die in the 1970s. It survived in the worlds that Polari had always touched, fashion, hairdressing, theater, and then broke out of them entirely. Stylists zhoosh a look, chefs zhoosh a sauce, interior designers zhoosh a living room. Makeover television carried it far beyond the gay world.

The final stamp of respectability came in September 2023, when Merriam-Webster added zhuzh to its dictionary, as a noun for a small improvement or addition that completes a look or a taste, and as a verb for improving something that way, often with up. Not bad for a word once whispered in private gay clubs.

Close relatives

If you like zhoosh, look at camp for the attitude behind it, at riah for the hair you are zhooshing, and at bona for what you hope people will say when you are done.

Related terms