Fuller

Several homonyms exist with the letters fuller.

• The comparative form of the adjective full is - as it should be in the regular form - fuller.
• Fuller is also a noun, denoting a worker in the textile industry. A fuller was engaged in fulling cloth (usually wool) - that is, washing the woven cloth and treating the surface so as to make it smooth, to felt it or to otherwise thicken it; generally to finish the surface to the desired state
  • This gives the occupational surname Fuller, which in turn names various businesses, ships and places, etc. The architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller gave his name to the allotrope (C₆₀) of carbon known as buckminxterfullerene, on the grounds of the resemblance of its structure to the geodesic domes invented by the eponym.
    • Certain items of the fulling profession are still known, such as fuller's earth (Latin terra fullonis), a form of clay used originally in fulling and now in various cleansing functions, and as a filler in paints, cosmetics and so on. From the first millennium, much of the labour in the process was replaced by the use of fulling mills, which used water power to drive mallets to pound the cloth in vats of the appropriate substances and liquids.
  • A largely obsolete noun fuller exists. It denotes a groove in a metal object, particularly that running round a horseshoe, through which the nails are driven into the horse's hoof. Hence fuller can mean the tool used to make the groove in a horseshoe - or other metal item. Sometimes this is a mould into which the metal is hammered.