Fuss

How to spell fuss

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce fuss

What does fuss mean?

1. nounAn unnecessary display of excitement, attention, or concern over something minor.
2. verbTo worry about or attend to small details in an anxious or excessive way.

Fuss in a sentence

• noun

  The waiter apologised and made a great fuss over the spilled wine.

• verb

  She tends to fuss over every comma in the report before sending it.

• noun

  There was a lot of fuss about the new parking rules at work.

• verb

  Try not to fuss with the curtains; they hang fine as they are.

Where does fuss come from?

Language of origin: Unknown

The origin of fuss is genuinely uncertain, which is why dictionaries hedge on it. It first appears in English in the early 1700s, and one of the more persuasive suggestions is that it began as an Anglo-Irish word, possibly carried into wider English through writers familiar with Ireland. Many scholars treat it as imitative, that is, a word coined to echo the bustling, fluttering, agitated sound and motion it describes, much like fizz or buzz. The earliest recorded uses already carry the modern sense of needless bother and excited activity over something trivial. Because there is no clear parent word in Latin, Greek, or Old French, the spelling is simply the plain English run of letters with its characteristic double s, the same doubling you see in muss and cuss.

How the word is built

• fuss (single root; no prefix or suffix, an uninflected base word)