Word.ws English Dictionary

powder puff

powder puff noun: a ball or pad of soft material used for the application of cosmetic powder to the face. Also the alternative form of powderpuff.

powder puff: a ball or pad of soft material used for the application of cosmetic powder to the face
Image: Evi Michailidou, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

powder puff (plural powder puffs)

  1. A ball or pad of soft material used for the application of cosmetic powder to the face.
    • The little bag, with its shiny, silvery jaws open, lay on her lap. He could see her powder-puff, her rouge stick, a bundle of letters, a phial of tiny black pills like seeds, a broken cigarette, a mirror, white ivory tablets with lists on them that had been heavily scored through. He thought: “In...1920, Katherine Mansfield [pseudonym; Kathleen Mansfield Murry], “The Escape”, in Bliss and Other Stories, London: Constable & Company, published 1920, →OCLC, page 273
    • Both the lipstick and the rouge are waterproof and frictionproof. They won't come off on your handkerchief or powder puff.1925, Cosmopolitan, volume 78, page 194
  2. Any of certain species of genus Calliandra.

Also used as

powder puff is also the alternative form of powderpuff.

Forms of powder puff

pluralpowder puffs
alternative formpowder-puff

Words formed from powder puff

Questions about powder puff

What does powder puff mean?
Powder puff means a ball or pad of soft material used for the application of cosmetic powder to the face.
What part of speech is powder puff?
Powder puff is a noun.
What is the plural of powder puff?
The plural of powder puff is powder puffs.

Words near powder puff in the dictionary

  1. powder of algaroth
  2. powder of sympathy
  3. powder one's nose
  4. powder pink
  5. powder pinks
  6. powder puff
  7. powder puffs
  8. Powder River
  9. Powder River County
  10. powder room
  11. powder rooms

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: powder puff (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-powder puff.wav.

Cite this entry: “powder puff.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/powder_puff. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.