Other forms: fluffed, fluffing, fluffs
Fluff is the soft, light stuff that gathers where nobody looks — grey lint in a trouser pocket, the bits that come off a new towel, the grey mat you peel out of the tumble dryer filter. To fluff a pillow is to shake and pat it so the air gets back in and it stands up plump again.
Small animals are made of the stuff: a chick is a ball of yellow fluff. Fluff up is the everyday phrasal form — birds fluff up their feathers in the cold, you fluff up the cushions before guests arrive. The adjective is fluffy: a fluffy towel, fluffy clouds, fluffy scrambled eggs. Then there is a second verb with nothing to do with pillows: to fluff a line, a catch or a penalty is to make a mess of it at the moment that counted. And writing with no substance in it gets called fluff — 'the whole report was fluff'.
1nounlintSoft light fibres that come off cloth and collect on clothes, in pockets and in corners.
“Her black coat was covered in fluff from the towel.”
synonyms: lint, down
2verbfluffTo shake or pat something soft so that it becomes fuller and lighter again.
“He fluffed the pillows and straightened the sheet.”
3verbbadlyTo do something badly by making a mistake at the crucial moment.
“The actor fluffed his lines in the opening scene.”
4nounentertainmentWriting or entertainment with nothing serious in it.
“The interview was pure fluff — she was never asked a hard question.”
Fluff grew out of an older English word floow, also written flough, flue and flew, meaning woolly substance, down, nap or lint. That came from the West Flemish vluwe, and beyond it the trail goes cold. A fitting history for a word that means the bits nobody can account for.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₂welh₁-
vls
vluwe
English, today
fluff
Built from
From earlier floow (“woolly substance, down, nap, lint”), also spelt flough, flue, and flew, from vls vluwe, of unknown ultimate origin:
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA