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futon.

A thin mattress of tufted cotton or similar material, placed on a floor or on a raised, foldable frame as a bed.

5 characters2 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/ˈfuːtɒn/Received-Pronunciation/ˈfutɑn/General-American
  1. A thin mattress of tufted cotton or similar material, placed on a floor or on a raised, foldable frame as a bed.

  2. A round cushion used for Zen meditation, traditionally made of woven bulrush leaves.

  3. A specific kind of sofa-bed, with a fixed cushion that forms a mattress when folded down and a sofa when folded up.

Where this word comes from

Borrowed from Japanese 布団 (futon), in turn from Middle Chinese 蒲團 (MC bu dwan, “meditation cushion”) (compare Mandarin 蒲团 (pútuán)), from 蒲 (bu, “bulrush, cattail”) + 團 (dwan, “sphere, round object”) from the way the original cushion was round and made from woven bulrushes.

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.