pud

The word 'pud' is a classic example of English colloquial clipping and nursery language. Its primary meaning as a child's word for 'hand' or 'fist' likely arose in the 19th century as a playful, reduplicative shortening of 'puddy', itself a variant of 'paw'. The parallel informal British use meaning 'pudding' is a straightforward 20th-century clipping of that longer word, following a common pattern of creating familiar, abbreviated terms for food. These two distinct streams of meaning for the same short, resonant syllable demonstrate how simple phonetic forms can independently arise in different corners of the language to express concrete, familiar concepts.

This word is a simplex, likely originating as a colloquial or childish shortening. It is not productively formed from combinable morphemes in modern English.