My wife is sure that Johnny Carson (Tonight Show) once stated that the proper name for pocket lint is "nurr" (my best guess at the spelling). We've both been researching this and have found nothing to confirm it. It would be an important addition to the quiz if it's true.

Any leads anyone?

Sorry - I didn't identify the referenced quiz as "The Worlds Only Quiz on Pocket Lint."

http://www.funtrivia.com/quizdetails.cfm?quiz=79967

I have been researching many reverse dictionaries with various spellings but still haven't been able to come up with anything.

Me either. A thesaurus says "see Fuzz" and there it says: " soft airy substance or covering <a comfortable old sweater with clumps of fuzz all over it>
Synonyms; down, floss, fluff, fur, lint, nap, pile". No help there.

Perhaps it was a part of a joke during his routine?

My Scottish mother used to call stuff like that oose, sorry but I'm not sure of the spelling.
It was one of those words that you used at home, but got mocked horribly if it slipped out anywhere else.

Perhaps he made one word out of two possible words for the lint... like taking "fur" and "nap" from NalaMarie's list above and combining the two to make "Nurr"... I do that all the time when I can't think of the name for something (and am too lazy to look it up)... like the strange berries that grow in my garden that look like raspberries but taste like strawberries... Straspberries!, make sense to me.

Thank you all for researching this. Because my wife's memory is infallible, we'll assume Johnny was inventing the word. It's a pretty handy word though, so we'll continue to use it within the family. For real words that describe what we find in our pockets, detritus is more accurate than fuzz. We work with horses.

Thanks again.

I haven`t found any substantial evidence of "nurr" but I have found the following,

Quote:

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But I do recall some celebrity from the 60's or late 50's (Orson Bean, maybe?) mentioning in an interview that there once was a Broadway showtune devoted to "nurr" (spelling totally uncertain but that's how it was pronounced) which this person explained was the technical term for lint that forms at the bottom of one's jacket pocket.

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, from here.

Cool link - I think it might be the closest we have come across so far, and very amusing too.