bejewel comes from the intensive prefix be- + jewel. Jewel comes from Old French jouel, perhaps a diminutive of jeu ('game, play'), from Latin jocus ('joke, game'), or from gemma ('jewel'). Morphologically, the word is transparent as a compound: its parts remain visible in the modern spelling, while the older history of those parts supplies the deeper ancestry. In modern use, the verb sense is "to decorate with or as with jewels", which keeps the etymology connected to the word's present dictionary value rather than treating it as a merely historical label. The wider word family includes related English forms such as jewel and derivatives such as bejeweled, bejewelled, bejeweling, showing how the same base continues to support neighboring English vocabulary. The principal historical forms in the chain include Old English be-, Old French jouel, which anchor the explanation in named linguistic material.