Stuffing

How to spell stuffing

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce stuffing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does stuffing mean?

1. nounA savoury mixture, often of breadcrumbs and herbs, packed inside meat or poultry or baked alongside it.
2. nounSoft material used to pad or fill cushions, toys, or furniture.

Stuffing in a sentence

• The roast turkey was served with sage and onion stuffing.

• The old armchair was losing its stuffing through a split seam.

• She prepared the stuffing the night before the big family dinner.

• The children pulled the stuffing out of the worn teddy bear.

Where does stuffing come from?

Language of origin: French

This word grows from the noun and verb 'stuff', which English took from the Old French 'estoffe', meaning woven material, furnishings, or equipment, together with the verb 'estoffer', meaning to equip or furnish. The French words are commonly traced back to the Latin 'stuppa', meaning the coarse fibre or tow used to pack and plug gaps, itself borrowed from the Greek 'styppe' with the same sense. From the idea of packing material the meaning broadened to 'to fill something tightly', and by the 1500s English speakers were applying 'stuff' to padding cushions and to filling meat for cooking. Adding the '-ing' noun ending turned the action into the thing itself: the material packed inside. That long history of 'fibre crammed into a gap' is a neat reminder that the word is built on the plain root 'stuff' with a simple double-f, not 'stuf-'.

How the word is built

• stuff (to fill or pad)
• -ing (noun suffix)