Plumelet is diminutive of plume (from Old French plume 'feather', from Latin pluma 'feather, down') + the diminutive suffix -let. Important recorded forms include plume (Old French) and pluma (Latin). Morphologically, the word preserves a built structure whose named elements carry the historical sense into English. The modern sense remains close to that composition, with the parts narrowing into a single lexical item. In current use it covers a small plume or tuft of feathers. The wider family includes related words such as plume, plumage, and plumaged.