noun

• (dialectal) A pin.
  "She never seemed to want for siller; the house was as bright as a new preen, the yaird better delved than the manse garden; […]"
• (dialectal) A bodkin; brooch.

verb

• (transitive) To pin; fasten.

verb

• (of birds, ambitransitive) To groom; to trim or dress the feathers with the beak.
• (of people, intransitive, reflexive) To spend time making oneself attractive and admiring one's appearance, e.g. in front of a mirror.
  "Mr Kernan halted and preened himself before the sloping mirror of Peter Kennedy, hairdresser. Stylish coat, beyond a doubt. Scott of Dawson street. Well worth the half sovereign I gave Neary for it."
• (intransitive) To show off, posture, or smarm.
  "His preening self-satisfaction, chest thrown forward as he settles into a chair in his mansion..."
• (transitive) To flatter.
  "In Miller's view the play is expressive of a peculiarly Renaissance vision of the harmonious marriage within the orderly society: 'its spirit derives from Elizabethan Puritanism's view of the household as an orderly place in whichc the marriage is consecrated not in the church but in the orderly procedures of domesticity ; in which obedience is required , not in order to preen the male pride of the father, but to restore order in a fallen world '"