An ornament is something you add to make something else more beautiful or festive. At Christmas, families hang ornaments on their trees: shiny glass balls, handmade decorations, or special keepsakes collected over the years. Each ornament doesn't serve a practical purpose like holding up the tree or keeping it watered, but it transforms an ordinary evergreen into something magical.

Beyond holiday decorations, ornaments appear throughout our lives. Ancient buildings feature stone ornaments carved into their facades. Musicians add ornamental notes to melodies, little flourishes that make the music more interesting without changing the basic tune. A writer might use an ornamental phrase to make prose more elegant, though too many ornaments can make writing feel cluttered.

Sometimes people use ornamental to describe something that looks nice but doesn't do much, like ornamental plants chosen for beauty rather than fruit, or an ornamental fence too delicate to keep anything in or out. When someone calls a person “merely ornamental,” they usually mean that person isn't contributing anything useful, which isn't a compliment. But in most cases, ornaments serve an important purpose: they add beauty, meaning, and joy to our world.