filler

name

1. A surname.

noun

Etymology: Etymology tree English fill Proto-Indo-European *-yósder. Proto-Italic *-āzijos Latin -āriusnom. Latin -āriusbor. Proto-Germanic *-ārijaz Proto-West Germanic *-ārī Old English -ere Middle English -ere English -er English filler From fill + -er.

1. One who fills.

   “They commonly have three, four, five, or six hewers or diggers, to four fillers, so as to keep the fillers always at work.”

2. Something added to fill a space or add weight or size.

   “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[…]”

3. Any semisolid substance used to fill gaps, cracks or pores.
4. A dermal filler, a substance injected beneath the skin to restore lost volume.

   “A 50-year-old patient will come in, and suddenly, she’s super-skinny and needs filler, which she never needed before.”

5. A relatively inert ingredient added to modify physical characteristics; a bulking agent.

   “The word "filler" is taboo in the excipient world.”

6. A short article in a newspaper or magazine.
7. A short piece of music or an announcement between radio or TV programmes.
8. Any spoken sound or word used to fill gaps in speech; filled pause.

   “'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.”

9. Cut tobacco used to make up the body of a cigar.
10. In COBOL, the description of an unnamed part of a record that contains no data relevant to a given context (normally capitalised when in a data division).
11. A plant that lacks a distinctive shape and can fill inconvenient spaces around other plants in pots or gardens.
12. Any standing tree or standard higher than the surrounding coppice in the form of forest known as "coppice under standards".
13. A material of lower cost or quality that is used to fill a certain television time slot or physical medium, such as a music album.

    “With the exception of her movie soundtracks — Lady Sings the Blues, and its flashy renditions of Billie Holiday standards, and the much less interesting Mahogany — Ross' early-'70s albums mixed predictably strong hits and an overabundance of filler.”