Stuffed toy
toy with an outer fabric sewn from a textile and then stuffed with flexible material
A stuffed toy is a toy with an outer fabric sewn from a textile and stuffed with flexible material. They are known by many names, such as stuffed animals, plush toys, plushies, stuffies and teddies; in Britain and Australia, they may also be called soft toys or cuddly toys. Stuffed toys are made in many different forms, but most resemble real animals (sometimes with exaggerated proportions or features), mythological creatures, cartoon characters, or inanimate objects. They can be commercially or home-produced from numerous materials, most commonly pile textiles like plush for the outer material and synthetic fiber for the stuffing. Often designed for children, some stuffed toys have become fads and collector's items.
In the late 19th century, Margarete Steiff and the Steiff company of Germany created the first stuffed animals. In 1902, a political cartoon of Theodore Roosevelt inspired the idea for "Teddy's bear". In 1903, Peter Rabbit was the first fictional character to be made into a patented stuffed toy. In 1921, A. A. Milne gave a stuffed bear to his son Christopher, which would inspire the creation of Winnie-the-Pooh. In the 1970s, London-based Hamleys toy store bought the rights to Paddington Bear stuffed toys.
“Stuffed toy” enters the record as toy with an outer fabric sewn from a textile and then stuffed with flexible material. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Stuffed, outer and fabric can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Stuffed toy” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Stuffed, outer and fabric provides the most credible route into that argument.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q682582. The Library of Congress control number is sh85124288. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1902, 1903 and 1921.
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This entry incorporates text from “Stuffed toy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.