Tidying up or trimming (edges)

Usage examples of neatening.

Then kinfolk sat around the fire to tell over the names of ancestors, to honor those who had achieved g’ status or Haghood among them, to relax standards of neatness and laundering (in the absence of whomever or whatever might have been, at other times, responsible for neatening and laundering), and to give amusing gifts and consume traditional foods prepared by their own hands while telling old stories around the tile stoves.

Then kinfolk sat around the fire to tell over the names of ancestors, to honor those who had achieved g' status or Haghood among them, to relax standards of neatness and laundering (in the absence of whomever or whatever might have been, at other times, responsible for neatening and laundering), and to give amusing gifts and consume traditional foods prepared by their own hands while telling old stories around the tile stoves.

Pam, who had turned her back, was busily neatening a stack of paint thinner in an obvious effort to act casual.

The one thing she was most terrified she would see was desire, so she pulled her hand from his and began making the feminine motions of neatening herself: pushing her hair out of her face, straightening her skirt, blotting under her eyes to remove any melted mascara.

A barrow was laden with tools and they pushed it to a long arbor walk overgrown with fruit vines and edged with flowers, where things needed a general clipping and weeding and neatening up.

He checked the room one last time, neatening knickknacks here and there.