▪ I. fuzzy, a.
(ˈfʌzɪ)
[f. fuzz n.1 + -y1. Cf. fozy.]
1. Not firm or sound in substance; spongy. Obs. exc. dial. (Cf. fozy.)
| 1616 Surfl. & Markh. Country Farme iv. iv. 498 If your ground be subiect to anie filthie soft mosse, or fuzzie grasse, which is both vnsauourie and vnwholesome for beasts. 1664 Power Exp. Philos. i. 5 A fuzzy kinde of substance like little sponges. 1725 Kelly in Phil. Trans. XXXIV. 122 A fuzzy sort of Earth, that we call Moss. 1728 T. Sheridan Persius (1739) 21 As dry and fuzzy as an old Branch spread over with Spungy Cork. 1824 Craven Gloss., Fuzzy, light and spungy. 1869 in Lonsdale Gloss. |
2. Frayed into loose fibres; covered with fuzz; fluffy, downy.
| 1713 Steele Englishm. No. 40. 259 Their Linnen of the same Hue, and so fuzzy that it was not easy to distinguish. 1823 Moor Suffolk Words s.v., The fine ends of silk or cotton..when they appear make the article ‘wear fuzzy’. 1857 Hughes Tom Brown i. v, Those fuzzy, dusty, padded first-class carriages. 1860 All Year Round No. 46. 460 Nine pennyworth of muslin with gilt fuzzy ends. 1885 Century Mag. XXX. 808 Seen through a magnifying glass, rough or plain paper has a surface..made up of fuzzy elevations and depressions, not unlike that of cotton cloth, but on a smaller scale. 1894 Times 9 Feb. 8/3 There are so many fuzzy politicians who have not hearts but only cotton wool in the place of them. |
3. Blurred, indistinct.
| 1778 Phil. Trans. LXVIII. 401 Venus appeared very dim and fuzzy. 1832 G. Downes Lett. Cont. Countries I. 30 The fuzzy glass. 1871 Daily News 20 Dec. 2/4 It makes the picture more ‘fuzzy’. 1884 Gd. Words Dec. 819/2 His drawing is rougher and fuzzier. |
b. Of thought, etc.: imprecisely defined; confused, vague. Also of persons: inexact in thought or expression.
| 1937 [see blurriness]. 1939 Canad. Forum Aug. 166/1 There is also a deplorable display of fuzzy moralizing which is distinctly out of place. 1955 Time 5 Dec. 16/2 What an appalling display of fuzzy thinking in some of the world's leading editorial comment! 1958 J. K. Galbraith Affluent Society xxiv. 347 Since these achievements are not easily measured, as a goal they are ‘fuzzy’..a fatal condemnation. 1968 N. Chomsky in Listener 30 May 690/3 It seems to me that empiricists have been a bit fuzzy on this. 1974 A. Lurie War between Tates iii. 51 Encouraging each other in escapism and fuzzy thinking; absorbing bogus ideas. 1977 Time 19 Sept. 23/1 The line between using a plane legitimately to build good will for a corporation and using it illegally seems fuzzy. |
c. Computing and
Logic. (Of a set) defined so as to allow for imprecise membership criteria and for gradations of membership; pertaining or belonging to such a set;
fuzzy logic, the logic of fuzzy sets and fuzzy concepts;
fuzzy matching, (the facility for) matching items which are similar but not identical.
| 1964 L. A. Zadeh et al. Memorandum (Rand Corporation) RM-4307-PR 1 The notion of a ‘fuzzy’ set..extends the concept of membership in a set to situations in which there are many, possibly a continuum of, grades of membership. 1969 IEEE Trans. Computers XVIII. 348/2 In the digital field, pattern recognitions and classification are..potential users of fuzzy logic. 1973 Jrnl. Philos. Logic II. 491 Fuzzy concepts have had a bad press among logicians. 1976 J. H. Conway Numbers & Games vii. 79 We say that g and h are confused or that g is fuzzy against h. 1979 Kandel & Lee Fuzzy Switching & Automata ii. 46 Definitions, theorems, proofs, etc., of fuzzy set theory always hold for non-fuzzy sets. 1982 IEEE Internat. Conf. Acoustics, Speech & Signal Processing II. 1162/1 One of the key problems in Image Understanding is the matching of two symbolic structures, a model and the result of a segmentation{ddd}We present..a formalism which can deal with the inexact or fuzzy matching of such structures in a highly parallel fashion. 1985 Computer Bull. Mar. 35/1 De Mori's work on acoustic phonetics is based on knowledge representation by the production rules of grammars, and reasoning by parsing, with fuzzy logic introduced at every stage. 1985 Computer Newslet. Mar. 2/1 There is a ‘fuzzy matching’ between what is requested and what is obtained from the system, in that they are only approximately related. |
4. Of hair: Frizzy, fluffy.
| a 1825 Forby Voc. E. Anglia, Fuzzy, rough and shaggy. 1856 F. E. Paget Owlet Owlst. 171 A..black man, with thick lips and fuzzy hair. 1870 Thornbury Tour Eng. II. xxi. 83 Fuzzy red wigs, stuck with jewels. |
5. Comb., as
fuzzy-headed,
fuzzy-legged,
fuzzy-minded adjs.;
fuzzy-ball = fuzz-ball;
fuzzy-wuzzy, a soldier's nickname for the typical Sudanese warrior, from his method of dressing his hair; hence as a slang term for a coloured native of other countries, such as Fiji and New Guinea.
| c 1850 Denham Tracts (1895) II. 48 The dust of a *fuzzy ball cast in the eyes will cause blindness. |
| 1885 Spectator 8 Aug. 1043/1 They were..*fuzzie-headed. |
| 1833 T. Hook Widow & Marquess xii, A couple of *fuzzy-legged hens. |
| 1983 P. Kurth Anastasia (1985) III. xii. 366 The world press rediscovered her in the early fifties—‘a *fuzzy-minded, ageing woman’, as Time magazine reported. |
| 1892 R. Kipling Barrack-room Ballads 10 So 'ere's to you, *Fuzzy-Wuzzy, at your 'ome in the Soudan. 1940 N. Mitford Pigeon Pie iii. 41 There are Chinks and Japs and Fuzzy Wuzzies and Ice Creamers and Dagos, and so on. Ibid. xiii. 208 You brutish Hun... Savage—Kaffir—fuzzy-wuzzy. 1965 Listener 30 Dec. 1067/1 England came up against a tough opponent after a series of easy victories against Tibetans, Zulus, and other relatively speaking unarmed fuzzy-wuzzies. |
Hence
ˈfuzzily adv.,
ˈfuzziness. Also
ˈfuzzyism [
-ism],
Photogr., the studied production of ‘fuzzy’ pictures.
| 1613 Markham Eng. Husbandman H ij, A little paire of round wheeles, which..doth so certainly guide the Plough..that it can neither..drownd through the easie lightnesse of the earth, nor runne too shallow through the fussinesse of the mould. 1866 Athenæum No. 2042. 801/1 A certain ‘fuzziness’, as artists say, appears in many examples. 1867 R. Broughton Not Wisely (1869) 10 They [locks of hair]..thence went off crisply, fuzzily, in a most unaffected wave. 1874 M. Collins Transmigr. II. xiv. 221 Her hair was a bunch of fuzziness. 1886 Century Mag. XXXI. 477 Tomentose appearance of stem or fuzziness of stem. 1894 Brit. Jrnl. Photogr. XLI. Supp. 5 A prelude to a descent into Fuzzyism. 1973 Jrnl. Philos. Logic II. 468 We have been employing a many-valued logic in an attempt to provide an initial explication of fuzziness in natural language. 1983 Nature 15 Dec. 637/2 Such a way of tackling the problem of AI seems to have inspired the now fashionable concern with what is called fuzziness, the attempt to build imprecision into programs. |
▸
fuzzy dice n. N. Amer. = fluffy dice n. at
fluffy adj. Additions.
| 1957 Los Angeles Times 26 Aug. iii. 5/1 Out must go those big *fuzzy dice and huge dangling spiders that the kids—young and old—have been tacking over their dashboards. 1980 Christian Sci. Monitor (Nexis) 31 July b4 Tailpipes, chrome glove compartments,..and fuzzy dice hanging from the rear view mirror. 2003 G. Shteyngart Russ. Debutante's Handbk. iv. xix. 192 Kostya sat in front, playing with the fuzzy dice. |
▪ II. fuzzy, n. slang. (
ˈfʌzɪ)
= fuzzy-wuzzy (
fuzzy a. 5).
| 1890 Kipling Barrack-room Ballads (1892) 10 The Fuzzy was the finest o' the lot. 1923 ― Land & Sea Tales 11 A wounded Sudanese—what our soldiers used to call a ‘fuzzy’. 1926 R. Macaulay Crewe Train ii. iii, Those infernal fuzzies of yours have upset the lamas. |