filler
/ˈfɪlɚ/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: 3.42 in modern English
9
Scrabble Score
6
Letters
2
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
One who fills.
noun
A relatively inert ingredient added to modify physical characteristics; a bulking agent.
noun
A short piece of music or an announcement between radio or TV programmes.
Example Sentences
- "They commonly have three, four, five, or six hewers or diggers, to four fillers, so as to keep the fillers always at work."
- "I recommend this album in the face of the fact that five of the eleven songs are the purest filler, dull instrumentals with a harmonica rifling over an indifferent rhythm section. The rest is magnificent[…]"
- "A 50-year-old patient will come in, and suddenly, she’s super-skinny and needs filler, which she never needed before."
- "The word "filler" is taboo in the excipient world."
- "'Tis a meer filler; to ſtop a vacancy in the Hexameter, and connect the Preface to the Work of Virgil."
- "As the years go by, speech reverts to childhood levels of disfluency, with more pauses, more errors, more repeated words, but even the peak years are not great: up to 8 percent of the average person’s word output consists of meaningless fillers and placeholders like um, uh and er."
Etymology
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *pleh₁- Proto-Indo-European *-nós Proto-Indo-European *pl̥h₁nós Proto-Germanic *fullaz Proto-Indo-European *-yeti Proto-Indo-European *-éyeti Proto-Germanic *-ijaną Proto-Germanic *fullijaną Proto-West Germanic *fullijan Old English fyllan Middle English fillen English fill Proto-Indo-European *-yósder. Proto-Italic *-āzios Latin -āriusnom. Latin -āriusbor. Proto-Germanic *-ārijaz Proto-West Germanic *-ārī Old English -ere Middle English -ere English -er English filler From fill + -er.
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈfɪlɚ/
- British English: /ˈfɪləː/