To dress up is to put on your finest clothes — or to put on a costume. Two senses, and only the occasion tells you which.
The smart sense is what you do for a wedding or a good restaurant, and dressing up for dinner is a fixed idea. The costume sense belongs to children and to parties, and dressing up as a pirate is the standard example. There is a figurative third sense, since dressing something up means making it sound better than it is, as in dressing up a cut as a reorganisation.
Practised in Clothes & Fashion, Phrasal Verbs, A Man Called Ove
First appears in chapter 2 of A Man Called Ove.
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