I’m reading Bill Bryson’s lovely book At Home and he states the only reason to believe that “tuffet” means stool is due to the nursery rhyme and that the “only place the word appears in historic English is in the nuserey rhyme itself”.
Wikipedia is rather muddy on the subject and there are a couple of dictionaries online that give a stool-type device as a definition. But there doesn’t seem to be a strong consensus.
There is an older thread on the subject (from 1999) but I didn’t want to bump it and I thought there might be more research available now.
So what’s the straight dope, is (was) tuffet a real word and what does it mean regarding the nursery rhyme?
The Online Ethimology Dictionary reports that it comes from the french.
Seems that it was thanks in big part to the nursery rime that the word was adopted into English, and then even though it has fallen into obsolescence it has remained viable just because of the nursery rime too.
Adding the tuft the word footstool and putting a bit of French (this sounds like a cooking recipe ) in a search we can see what miss Muffet most likely did sit on:
“Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet,
eating her curds and whey,
Along came a spider, and sat down beside her,
…so she squished it with her spoon.”
I had learned that a tuffet would be large lump covered with grass, a raised hump of old grass, soft, so being a logical outdoor spot to sit, except for the @%#@ spiders.
As I’m reading I find myself bouncing back and forth to the computer to check some of his incredible claims. They are mostly true - in the sense that they are written to entertain I suppose. Still, it is a fun read.
I think the original did not have the clarity that was needed to identify if it was a grass bit or a footstool, one way to find with more precision what it was would be to see if the French word this was most likely to come from does refer to the furniture or the patch of grass.
I thought also that one way to settle this one has to check how this was pictured in the past but as Wikipedia shows with 2 pictures from versions from the early 20th century the illustrators do not agree on what to pick.
It also seems to me that to confuse this more a tuft of grass and the meaning applied to furniture refer to a similar look: the look of material seemingly to come from specific points. So one describes how a bit of grass looks like and also can be used to describe the knitting points/shapes on the top of a footstool.
) in a search we can see what miss Muffet most likely did sit on: