chaffy
English
[edit]Etymology 1
[edit]Adjective
[edit]chaffy (comparative chaffier, superlative chaffiest)
- Like or containing chaff.
- 1816, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan[3]:
- A mighty fountain […] / Amid whose swift half-intermitted Burst / Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, / Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
- 1940, Mikhail Sholokhov, chapter 6, in Stephen Garry, transl., The Don Flows Home to the Sea[4], section 1, pages 44-45:
- The burning, pungent scent of newly threshed wheat and a chaffy dust enveloped the village.
- (botany) (of bracts, flower head receptacles, scales on cones or catkins) Resembling chaff: papery, husk-like; not fleshy, leafy or herbaceous.
- (agriculture) (of an ear of corn/maize) Having imperfectly developed kernels that are not tightly compressed against each other.[1]
- (obsolete) Of as little value or substance as chaff; worthless.
- Synonyms: strawlike, two-bit, valueless; see also Thesaurus:worthless
- 1634, John Fletcher and William Shakespeare, “Act 3”, in The Two Noble Kinsmen[5], page 36:
- […] thou ly’st, and art / A very theefe in love, a Chaffy Lord / Nor worth the name of villaine:
- 1661, Joseph Glanvill, chapter 15, in The Vanity of Dogmatizing[6], page 137:
- […] the most slight and chaffy opinion, if at a great remove from the present age, contracts such an esteem and veneration, that it out-weighs what is infinitly more ponderous and rational, of a modern date.
Derived terms
[edit]See also
[edit]Etymology 2
[edit]Adjective
[edit]chaffy (comparative chaffier, superlative chaffiest)
- (colloquial, obsolete) Full of banter, ridicule or badinage. [mid-19th to 20th century.][2]
- 1859, Henry Hall Dixon (as “The Druid”), chapter 1, in Silk and Scarlet[7], pages 58-59:
- He would talk for an hour; then he would half-draw, and talk again, and often blow his horn when there was no manner of occasion—always so chaffy.