Word.ws English Dictionary

chaffy

chaffy adjective: like or containing chaff.

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
    • The burning, pungent scent of newly threshed wheat and a chaffy dust enveloped the village.1940, Mikhail Sholokhov, chapter 6, in Stephen Garry, transl., The Don Flows Home to the Sea, section 1, pages 44-45
  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
    • […] 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.1661, Joseph Glanvill, chapter 15, in The Vanity of Dogmatizing, page 137

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

Synonyms of chaffy

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All synonyms of chaffy

Forms of chaffy

comparativechaffier
superlativechaffiest

Origin of chaffy

From chaff + -y.

Words formed from chaffy

Questions about chaffy

What does chaffy mean?
Chaffy means like or containing chaff.
What part of speech is chaffy?
Chaffy is an adjective.

Words near chaffy in the dictionary

  1. chaffs
  2. chaffwax
  3. chaffwaxes
  4. chaffweed
  5. chaffweeds
  6. chaffy
  7. Chafin
  8. chafing
  9. chafing at the bit
  10. chafing dish
  11. chafing dishes

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: 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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