Furry

How to spell furry

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce furry

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does furry mean?

1. adjectiveCovered in fur, or soft and fluffy like fur.

Furry in a sentence

• The kitten pressed its furry body against the warm radiator.

• She wrapped the baby in a furry blanket for the cold drive home.

Where does furry come from?

Language of origin: French

This adjective is built on the noun 'fur', which came into English in the 1300s from the Old French verb 'forrer', meaning 'to line or trim a garment'. That French word in turn traced back to a Frankish source 'fodr', meaning a 'sheath' or 'lining', the same Germanic root that gives us the idea of a protective case. So at first 'fur' referred not to the animal's coat itself but to the warm lining sewn inside a garment, and only later did it come to mean the soft hairy coat of an animal. The adjective 'furry', meaning 'covered in fur' or 'resembling fur', is recorded from the 1400s, formed simply by adding '-y' to 'fur'. The single 'r' of 'fur' doubles before the suffix because the vowel before it is short, which is exactly the spelling trap: the base has one r, the adjective has two.

How the word is built

• fur (animal hair coat)
• -ry (adjective suffix, here doubling the r after a short vowel)