Word.ws English Dictionary

chaffier

chaffier is the comparative form of chaffy.

Meaning of chaffy

Adjective (1)

chaffy (comparative chaffier, superlative chaffiest)

  1. Like or containing chaff.
    • A mighty fountain […] / Amid whose swift half-intermitted Burst / Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, / Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:1816, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan
  2. (of bracts, flower head receptacles, scales on cones or catkins) Resembling chaff: papery, husk-like; not fleshy, leafy or herbaceous.
  3. (of an ear of corn/maize) Having imperfectly developed kernels that are not tightly compressed against each other.
  4. (obsolete) Of as little value or substance as chaff; worthless.
    • […] thou ly’st, and art / A very theefe in love, a Chaffy Lord / Nor worth the name of villaine:1634, John Fletcher and William Shakespeare, “Act 3”, in The Two Noble Kinsmen, page 36

Adjective (2)

chaffy (comparative chaffier, superlative chaffiest)

  1. (colloquial, obsolete) Full of banter, ridicule or badinage.
    • 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.1859, Henry Hall Dixon (as “The Druid”), chapter 1, in Silk and Scarlet, pages 58-59

Questions about chaffier

What is chaffier the comparative form of?
Chaffier is the comparative form of chaffy.

Words near chaffier in the dictionary

  1. chaffern
  2. chafferns
  3. chaffers
  4. chaffery
  5. chaffie
  6. chaffier
  7. chaffies
  8. chaffiest
  9. chaffily
  10. Chaffin
  11. chaffinch

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: chaffier (page history and authors); chaffy (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.

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