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''chaff'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260313192153-00-⌔

chaff - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

chaff (usually uncountable, plural chaffs)

  • The inedible parts of a grain -producing plant.
    • ✤ Coordinate term: bran
    • ✤ To separate out the chaff, early cultures tossed baskets of grain into the air and let the wind blow away the lighter chaff.
    • ✤ So take the corn and leave the chaff behind.1
    • ✤ In the passage outside the door, the threshers, who had done their day’s work, were stamping the snow off their feet before they came in, - their hair full of chaff.2
  • Straw or hay cut up fine for the food of cattle.
    • ✤ By adding chaff to his corn, the horse must take more time to eat it, and time is given for the commencement of digestion, before fermentation can occur. In this way chaff is very useful, especially after long fasts.3
  • (figurative) Any excess or unwanted material, resource, or person; anything worthless.
    • ✤ the chaff and ruin of the times4
    • ✤ Who that has prided himself on his spiritual strength has not seen it humbled to the dust? A knowledge of religion, as distinguished from experience, seems but chaff in such moments of trial.5
  • Light jesting talk; banter; raillery.
    • ✤ As for Huxter, perfectly at good-humour with himself, and the world, it never entered his mind that he could be disagreeable to anybody; and the little dispute, or “chaff,” as he styled it, of Vauxhall, was a trifle which he did not in the least regard.6
    • ✤ It was the chaff of the College at the time, but I could not help it.7
  • (military) Loose material, e.g. small strips of aluminum foil dropped from aircraft, intended to interfere with radar detection.
    • ✤ Synonym: window
    • ✤ Hyponym: rope

Verb

chaff (third-person singular simple present chaffs, present participle chaffing, simple past and past participle chaffed)

  • (intransitive) To use light, idle language by way of fun or ridicule; to banter.
  • (transitive) To make fun of; to turn into ridicule by addressing in ironical or bantering language.
    • ✤ Synonym: quiz
    • ✤ We were talking about it at mess, yesterday, and chaffing Derby Oaks—until he was as mad as a hatter.8
    • ✤ I’ve fallen asleep on my step as the ’bus was going on, and almost fallen off. I have often to put up with insolence from vulgar fellows, who think it fun to chaff a cad, as they call it.9
    • ✤ Bobby Wick stormed through the tents of his Company, rallying, rebuking, mildly, as is consistent with the Regulations, chaffing the faint-hearted[.]10
  • (transitive) To cut up (straw or hay) for use as cattle feed.

Etymology

From Middle English chaf, from Old English ċeaf, from Proto-West Germanic ﹡kaf. Cognate with Scots caff, Saterland Frisian Sääf, West Frisian tsjêf, Dutch kaf, German Low German Kaff, regional German Kaff.

Pronunciation

  • (Received Pronunciation) IPA: /t͡ʃæf/, /t͡ʃɑːf/
  • Audio (Southern England): 🔊
  • (US) IPA: /t͡ʃæf/
  • Rhymes: -æf

Printed 2026-06-28.

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Footnotes

  1. 1700, [John] Dryden, “The Cock and the Fox: Or, The Tale of the Nun’s Priest, from Chaucer”, in Fables Ancient and Modern; […], London: […] Jacob Tonson, […], →OCLC: ↩

  2. 1886, Peter Christen Asbj&oslash￵rnsen, translated by H.L. Brækstad, Folk and Fairy Tales, page 251: ↩

  3. 1831, William Youatt, The Horse, page 130: ↩

  4. c. 1596–1598 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Merchant of Venice”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act II, scene ix]: ↩

  5. 1927-1929, Mahatma Gandhi, chapter XXI, in Mahadev Desai, transl., The Story of My Experiments with Truth, published 1940: ↩

  6. 1848 November – 1850 December, William Makepeace Thackeray, chapter 51, in The History of Pendennis. […], volume, London: Bradbury and Evans, […], published 1849–1850, →OCLC: ↩

  7. 1886 October – 1887 January, H[enry] Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., published 1887, →OCLC: ↩

  8. 1848 November – 1850 December, William Makepeace Thackeray, chapter 10, in The History of Pendennis. […], volume, London: Bradbury and Evans, […], published 1849–1850, →OCLC: ↩

  9. 1851, Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, published 1861: ↩

  10. 1889, Rudyard Kipling, “Only A Subaltern”, in Under the Deodars, Boston: The Greenock Press, published 1899, page 148: ↩

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