Fluff

How to spell fluff

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce fluff

What does fluff mean?

1. nounSoft, light, fibrous material such as lint, down, or loose fibres.
2. verbTo shake or pat something soft so that it becomes fuller and lighter.
3. verbTo bungle or perform badly, especially to forget or stumble over spoken lines.

Fluff in a sentence

• noun

  A layer of grey fluff had gathered in the dryer filter.

• verb

  She liked to fluff the pillows before guests arrived.

• verb

  The lead actor tended to fluff his lines during the first rehearsal.

• noun

  The kitten chased a ball of fluff across the floor.

• verb

  A quick brush will fluff the towels after they dry.

• verb

  A nervous presenter can fluff the opening remarks.

Where does fluff come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Fluff first appears in English in the 1700s and is generally regarded as a variant of the older word 'flue', which meant soft downy fibres or pieces of fur and lint. The exact path is uncertain, but the doubled 'ff' ending and the puffy sound of the word seem partly imitative, evoking the lightness of the soft stuff it names; some scholars also point to a possible link with Flemish 'vluwe', meaning a tuft of wool. From the literal sense of soft fibrous material it quickly grew figurative uses: by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries 'fluff' could mean light, inconsequential entertainment, and 'to fluff' came to mean to bungle a line or a task. The single short vowel and the clean doubled consonant make it an easy word to spell, since the way it sounds matches the way it looks. Because its origins are genuinely murky, dictionaries usually label it of uncertain derivation.

How the word is built

• fluff (a single morpheme; imitative word with no internal prefix or suffix)