Word.ws English Dictionary

tuft

/tʌft/

More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations

Australia/tɐft/

tuft noun: a bunch of feathers, grass or hair, etc., held together at the base.

Noun

tuft (plural tufts)

  1. A bunch of feathers, grass or hair, etc., held together at the base.
  2. A cluster of threads drawn tightly through upholstery, a mattress or a quilt, etc., to secure and strengthen the padding.
  3. A small clump of trees or bushes.
    • “Not far from this place, there is a tuft of about a dozen of tall beeches […].”1755, Miguel de Cervantes, translated by Tobias Smollett, Don Quixote, Volume One, II.4
  4. (historical) A gold tassel on the cap worn by titled undergraduates at English universities.
  5. (historical) A person entitled to wear such a tassel.
    • A college tutor, or a nobleman’s toady, who appears one fine day as my right reverend lord, in a silk apron and a shovel-hat, and assumes benedictory airs over me, is still the same man we remember at Oxbridge, when he was truckling to the tufts, and bullying the poor undergraduates in the...1848 November – 1850 December, William Makepeace Thackeray, chapter 62, in The History of Pendennis. […], volume (please specify |volume=I or II), London: Bradbury and Evans, […], published...
    • Several young tufts, and others of the faster men.1859–1861, [Thomas Hughes], Tom Brown at Oxford: […], (please specify |part=1 or 2), Boston, Mass.: Ticknor and Fields, published 1861, →OCLC

Verb

tuft (third-person singular simple present tufts, present participle tufting, simple past and past participle tufted)

  1. (transitive) To provide or decorate with a tuft or tufts.
    • His tufted cottage rising through the snowa. 1749 (date written), James Thomson, “Winter”, in The Seasons, London: […] A[ndrew] Millar, and sold by Thomas Cadell, […], published 1768, →OCLC
  2. (transitive) To form into tufts.
  3. (transitive) To secure and strengthen (a mattress, quilt, etc.) with tufts. This hinders the stuffing from moving.
    • They're never gonna get that Ottoman tufted in time!2017 December 2, “The Impossible Summit of Mt. Neverrest!” (0:13 from the start), in DuckTales, season 1, episode 3
  4. (intransitive) To be formed into tufts.

Proper noun capitalized: Tuft

Tuft (plural Tufts)

  1. A surname.

tuft meaning in Tamil, Urdu, Telugu and Malayalam

tuft in Tamil

கொத்து, சுள்ளு

tuft in Urdu

گچھا, کلغی, پھندنا

tuft in Telugu

a tuft or lock of hair left on the crown of the head
శిఖ śikha

tuft in Malayalam

കെട്ട്, അലക്ക്, കുടുമ, തൂവൽക്കൂട്ടം
More languagesFewer languages
tuft in Kannada
ಜುಟ್ಟು, ಶಿಖೆ, ಕುಚ್ಚು, ಕೊಪ್ಪು
tuft in Punjabi
ਗੁੱਛਾ gucchā
tuft in Sanskrit
वेद vedá, दर्भ darbhá

Examples of tuft in a sentence

  • When rosy plumelets tuft the larch.
  • Some birds are feathered tufts of color so resplendent that they stand out brilliantly from their surroundings.
  • Fruticose lichens drape and tuft; crustose and squamulose lichens creep and seep; foliose lichens layer and flake.

All 32 example sentences with tuft

Forms of tuft

Noun
pluraltufts
Verb
third-person singular presenttufts
present participletufting
past participletufted
pasttufted
Proper noun
pluralTufts

Past tense of tuft: tufted

Plural of tuft: tufts

Origin of tuft

From Middle English tuft, toft, tofte, an alteration of earlier *tuffe (> Modern English tuff), from Old French touffe, tuffe, toffe, tofe (“tuft”) (modern French touffe), from Late Latin tūfa (“helmet crest”) (near Vegezio). Compare Old English þūf (“tuft”), Old Norse þúfa (“mound”), Swedish tuva (“tussock; grassy hillock”), Swedish tova (“tangled knot”), Swedish tofs (“tuft, tassel”), from Proto-Germanic *þūbǭ (“tube”), *þūbaz; akin to Latin tūber (“hump, swelling”), Ancient Greek τῡ́φη (tū́phē, “cattail (used to stuff beds)”).

Words formed from tuft

Words that rhyme with tuft

6 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about tuft

What does tuft mean?
Tuft means a bunch of feathers, grass or hair, etc., held together at the base.
What is tuft in Tamil?
Tuft in Tamil is கொத்து, சுள்ளு. See Tuft meaning in Tamil.
What part of speech is tuft?
Tuft can be a noun, a verb or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce tuft?
Tuft is pronounced /tʌft/ (UK).
What is the plural of tuft?
The plural of tuft is tufts.

Words near tuft in the dictionary

  1. Tufnell Park
  2. tufoli
  3. tufon
  4. tufons
  5. TUFROC
  6. tuft
  7. tuft-hunter
  8. tuft-hunters
  9. tuft-hunting
  10. tuft-taffeta
  11. tuft-taffetas

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tuft (page history and authors); Tuft (page history and authors); tuft (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); tuft (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); శిఖ (Telugu) (page history and authors); tuft (Malayalam Wiktionary) (page history and authors); tuft (Kannada Wiktionary) (page history and authors); ਗੁੱਛਾ (Punjabi) (page history and authors); दर्भ (Sanskrit) (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.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-tuft.wav.

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