ombudsman

Pronounced: AHM-budz-muhn, noun

Notes: I thought I knew what this meant, but I didn’t

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Yesterday’s word

The word tuffet means

• a clump of something
• a mound
• a low seat, stool, cushion, etc

First usage

Our word came into English in the mid-1500s

Background / Comments

I mentioned the “Little Miss Muffet” nursery rhyme yesterday; it has multiple variation; the one I learned runs as follows:

Little Miss Muffet
Sat on a tuffet
Eating her curds and whey
Along came a spider
And sat down beside her
And frightened Miss Muffet away

With the combination of limited vocabulary and imagination, some children hear the third line as “Eating her courage away”, which I find funny — and it fits the rest of the rhyme. Our word is a diminutive of tuft, which came from the French word touffe (tuft). The nursery rhyme most likely refers to a mound, but the idea of it being a low seat of stool contributed to the word taking on that definition.