fluff
n. uncountablen. soft, light pieces of wool, hair, or dust that look like small clouds. You often find it on your clothes or under your bed.
n. soft, light, downy particles of fabric, hair, or dust that tend to accumulate in clusters. Often refers to superficial or trivial content in media or literature.
I need a brush to remove the white fluff from my black coat.
The dryer filter was completely blocked with grey fluff after we washed the new wool blankets.
While the lead actor's performance was technically sound, critics dismissed the screenplay as mere cinematic fluff that lacked the emotional depth of his previous work.
From earlier floow (“woolly substance, down, nap, lint”), also spelt flough, flue, and flew, from West Flemish vluwe, of uncertain ultimate origin: * Compare Old English flōh (“that which is flown off, fragment, piece”); see flaw * Possibly representing a blend of flue + puff; compare Middle Dutch vloe, or perhaps onomatopoeic; compare dialectal English floose, flooze, fleeze (“particles of wool or cotton; fluff; loose threads or fibres”), Danish fnug (“down, fluff”), Swedish fnugg (“speck, flake”). * Alternatively, West Flemish vluwe may derive from French velu (“hairy, furry”), from Latin villūtus (“having shaggy hair”), from villus (“shaggy hair, tuft of hair”). For words of similar sound and meaning in other languages, compare Japanese フワフワ (fuwafuwa, “lightly, softly”), Hungarian puha (“soft, fluffy”), Polish puchaty (“soft, fluffy”), Romanian puf (“down, peachfuzz, soft hair of some animals, powderpuff”).
Often used metaphorically to describe entertainment or information that is light and lacks substance.