Puffy

How to spell puffy

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce puffy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does puffy mean?

1. adjectiveSwollen, rounded, or soft in appearance, as if filled with air.

Puffy in a sentence

• Her eyes looked puffy after a night of crying.

• The bakery sold light, puffy pastries that melted in the mouth.

Where does puffy come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is built on 'puff', a native English word that traces back to the Old English 'pyffan', a verb that imitated the sound of blowing air sharply from the mouth. Words formed this way are called echoic or imitative, because the spelling tries to capture the noise itself, in this case the soft burst of breath. By the Middle Ages 'puff' had come to describe both a quick gust of air and anything that looked swollen or inflated, as if filled with air. The adjective 'puffy' appeared in the 1600s by adding the common '-y' ending, giving the sense of something rounded, soft, and swollen. Because the base 'puff' already ends in a doubled 'f', the spelling carries that pair straight through into 'puffy', which is the main thing to remember.

How the word is built

• puff (a short burst of air or a soft rounded shape)
• -y (adjective suffix meaning 'having the quality of')