stuffing

Pluralstuffings

1. 1
   nouncountable or uncountable

   A seasoned mixture, often of bread and herbs, packed inside poultry or other meat before cooking.

   The cook filled the turkey with a chestnut stuffing before roasting it.

   He prefers cornbread stuffing to the bread-based kind at Thanksgiving.

   Similardressing, filling, forcemeat

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The soft material packed into hollow objects such as pillows and saddles to give them shape and firmness.

   The upholsterer replaced the saddle's worn stuffing with fresh padding.

   Foam stuffing makes modern pillows lighter than the old feather-filled ones.

   Similarpadding, filling, wadding, batting

3. 3
   noununcountable

   The process of filling something by packing another material firmly inside it.

   The stuffing of sausages is done by forcing seasoned meat into casings.

   Proper stuffing of the cushion requires even distribution of the filling.

   Similarfilling, packing

   Oppositeemptying

4. 4
   verb

   Present participle of stuff.

   He spent the morning stuffing pillows with feathers.

   The workers were stuffing boxes with packing foam.

   Note

   The -ing form does two jobs. As a participle it builds progressive tenses (they were stuffing boxes). As a gerund it names the action itself (stuffing pillows is slow work). With a reflexive pronoun it shifts to greedy eating, as in stuffing himself at dinner. The same stuff plus -ing also gives the nouns, from the filling in a pillow to the cook's filling.

5. 5
   nouncountable

   A severe defeat, especially a one-sided loss in a sporting contest.

   The visitors handed the league leaders an embarrassing stuffing.

   After such a stuffing, the manager faced tough questions from reporters.

   Similarthrashing, drubbing, trouncing, hammering, rout

   Note

   Sports-report language for a thrashing, and it is usually framed as something handed over. A side is given a stuffing, or hands one out, and the noun readily takes intensifiers such as absolute or proper. Like hiding or hammering, it describes the scale of the result rather than how the game was played.

   United were given an absolute stuffing by City.

   They handed their rivals a proper stuffing on Saturday.

6. 6
   noununcountable

   The practice of inserting many copies of a word into a web page to push it higher in search engine rankings.

   The agency relied on stuffing, cramming the same keyword into every paragraph to fool the algorithm.

   Google's updates made stuffing useless for boosting a site's visibility.

   Note

   Search-engine jargon borrows the upholsterer's image: a page is crammed with one repeated word the way a cushion is packed with its padding. The repetition is aimed at ranking software rather than at people, which is why such text reads so badly to a human eye. In this sense the stuffed material is always a search term.

7. 7
   noununcountable

   A mixture of oil and tallow worked into leather to soften and dress it.

   Traditional tanners prepared their own stuffing from neatsfoot oil and tallow.

   A coat of warm stuffing restored the cracked harness to suppleness.

   Similardubbin, dressing

8. 8
   nounUSuncountable

   A tax loophole in which a corporation acquires loss-making property purely to reduce the tax it owes.

   Auditors flagged the deal as stuffing, an acquisition made only to manufacture a deductible loss.

   Reform proposals targeted stuffing alongside other corporate tax avoidance schemes.

   Note

   American tax law's name for buying a loser on purpose. A corporation takes on property it expects to lose money, and that loss then lowers the tax it owes. The term belongs to US legal and financial writing. Elsewhere, readers will reach first for the kitchen sense or the web-ranking trick, so establish the tax setting before using the word.

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