Fuzz

How to spell fuzz

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce fuzz

What does fuzz mean?

1. nounA mass of fine, soft fibres, hairs, or down that lifts loosely from a surface.
2. nounAn informal, slang term for the police.

Fuzz in a sentence

• A layer of grey fuzz had collected behind the radiator.

• The getaway driver warned the others that the fuzz were on their way.

• The new towels left fuzz all over his dark suit.

• In the old crime film, the robbers panicked at the first sight of the fuzz.

Where does fuzz come from?

Language of origin: Other

Fuzz first appears in English in the early 1600s, most likely as a back-formation from 'fuzzy', and it carries the feel of an imitative or descriptive coinage for something light, loose, and downy. Several scholars connect it to the Low German or Dutch word 'fussig', meaning 'spongy' or 'loose', which fits the sense of soft fibres that lift away from a surface. Its earliest recorded use referred to the fine fluff shed by cloth and the soft down on fruit and plants, and that concrete meaning has stayed remarkably stable. Over time the word stretched to cover blurred, indistinct edges, giving us the 'fuzzy' photograph and the fuzzy radio signal. In twentieth-century American slang it took an entirely separate path to mean the police, a sense whose exact origin is genuinely unclear and still debated. Because the word is short and ends in a doubled 'zz', the only real spelling decision is remembering that double z rather than a single one.

How the word is built

• fuzz (a single base word of imitative origin, no prefix or suffix)