Word.ws English Dictionary

chafe

/t͡ʃeɪf/

chafe noun: heat excited by friction.

Noun

chafe (countable and uncountable, plural chafes)

  1. Heat excited by friction.
  2. Injury or wear caused by friction.
  3. (archaic) Vexation; irritation of mind; rage.
    • Like a wylde Bull, that, being at a bay, / Is bayted of a mastiffe and a hound / […] That in his chauffe he digs the trampled ground / And threats his horns […]1596, Edmund Spenser, “Book VI, Canto V”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC
    • When we returned we found the poor prisoner in a terrible chafe with the sentinel for detaining him, for the guard had been true to his trust.1830, Joseph Plumb Martin, The Adventures Of A Revolutionary Soldier

Verb

chafe (third-person singular simple present chafes, present participle chafing, simple past and past participle chafed)

  1. (transitive) To excite heat in by friction; to rub in order to stimulate and make warm.
  2. (figuratively, transitive) To excite passion or anger in; to fret; to irritate.
  3. (transitive) To fret and wear by rubbing.
    • to chafe a cable
    • i was reminded why i stopped wearing jeans. they hurt so bad compared to pleated pants […] yeah, but the sides of my hips and my junk were all sore. idr the english word, but ig they were ”wearing against it”. oh ”chafe”?2025 October 3, Oskar Skalmstad, “ThunderWazp”, in discord.com (Usenet)
  4. (intransitive) To rub; to come together so as to wear by rubbing; to wear by friction.
    • the troubled Tiber chafing with her shores1599 (first performance), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Iulius Cæsar”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward]...
    • [Gitche Manito] Breathed upon the neighbouring forest, / Made its great boughs chafe together, / Till in flame they burst and kindled; […]1855 November 10, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Peace-pipe”, in The Song of Hiawatha, Boston, Mass.: Ticknor and Fields, →OCLC, page 12
  5. (intransitive) To be worn by rubbing.
    • A cable chafes.
  6. (figuratively, intransitive) To have a feeling of vexation; to be vexed; to fret; to be irritated.
    • He will chafe at the doctor's marrying my daughter.c. 1597 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Merry Wiues of Windsor”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward]...
    • Many local politicians chafed under the restrictions of Guided Democracy[…]1996, Jim Schiller, Developing Jepara in New Order Indonesia, page 58

chafe meaning in Hindi, Bengali, Malayalam and Kannada

chafe in Hindi

to chafe
काटना kāṭnā

chafe in Bengali

ঘর্ষণ করা, বিরক্ত করা

chafe in Malayalam

തിരുമ്മുക, ഉരച്ചു ചൂടാക്കുക, പ്രകോപിപ്പിക്കുക

chafe in Kannada

ಕನಲು, ತರಿ, ಉಜ್ಜು, ತಿಕ್ಕು, ತೀಡು, ಉಜ್ಜಿ ಒರಟಾಗಿಸು

Examples of chafe in a sentence

  • Uighurs, the region’s largest ethnic group, had long chafed under official discrimination and economic marginalization under Beijing.
  • That chafes a bit, his assumption that my horizons need unnarrowing.
  • But Bechet chafed under even the loose discipline of the Ellington group, and left.

All 20 example sentences with chafe

Forms of chafe

Noun
pluralchafes
Verb
third-person singular presentchafes
present participlechafing
past participlechafed
pastchafed

Origin of chafe

Inherited from Middle English chaufen (“to warm”), borrowed from Old French chaufer (modern French chauffer), from Latin calefacere, calfacere (“to make warm”), from calere (“to be warm”) + facere (“to make”). See caldron.

Words formed from chafe

Words that rhyme with chafe

Questions about chafe

What does chafe mean?
Chafe means heat excited by friction.
What is chafe in Hindi?
Chafe in Hindi is काटना (kāṭnā). See Chafe meaning in Hindi.
What part of speech is chafe?
Chafe can be a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce chafe?
Chafe is pronounced /t͡ʃeɪf/ (US).
What is the plural of chafe?
The plural of chafe is chafes.

Words near chafe in the dictionary

  1. chaetothyriaceous
  2. chaetothyrialean
  3. chaetothyrialeans
  4. chaetoviridin
  5. chafage
  6. chafe
  7. chafe at the bit
  8. chafed
  9. chafed at the bit
  10. chafen
  11. chafened

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: chafe (page history and authors); काटना (Hindi) (page history and authors); chafe (Bengali Wiktionary) (page history and authors); chafe (Malayalam Wiktionary) (page history and authors); chafe (Kannada Wiktionary) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-chafe.ogg.

Cite this entry: “chafe.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/chafe. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.