Word.ws English Dictionary

cruff

cruff adjective: crude, rough, uncouth, tough.

Adjective

cruff (comparative more cruff, superlative most cruff)

  1. (Caribbean) Crude, rough, uncouth, tough.
    • Dem gwan like ooman strong like man
      An cruff an rough an hard!1982, Louise Bennett-Coverley, “Tan-up Seat”, in Selected Poems
    • but if he looks a bit cruff ... an’ he says, ‘Wa ’appen, son. Wa gwaan’, an’ all dem tings der, an’ you start to speak to him in English, then you just break into the Jamaican habit – patois1986, Roger Hewitt, quoting an anonymous black British informant, White Talk Black Talk: Inter-racial Friendship and Communication amongst Adolescents, page 108

Noun

cruff (plural cruffs)

  1. (Caribbean) A person who is uncouth, crude, or tough.
    • Rufus was a Barbadian cruff
      Who got the news how Miss Ida rough.
      Rufus say, “Jamaica bwoi too light,
      So I am going to show them how to fight.”1955, “Rough Rider”, Alerth Bedasse (lyrics), Everard Williams (music)
    • “But the miserable cruff never did come back. He abandoned us! They say he went off into the woods to grow some exotic crop.” “Exotic Jamaican crop? It could be anything.”2024 September 9, Bill Odenkirk, “Planet Espresso” (2:48 from the start), in Futurama, season 12, episode 7, spoken by Hermes Conrad (Phil LaMarr)
  2. (Caribbean, derogatory, often) A lazy person; someone of little value.
    • “You still the living bumpkin from the land of Oz!”
      “And you’re still a cruff wid no gyal!”2023, Alex Wheatle, Sufferah: Memoir of a Brixton Reggae Head, page 85

Forms of cruff

Adjective
comparativemore cruff
superlativemost cruff
Noun
pluralcruffs

Origin of cruff

Unknown. Compare scruff (“one with untidy appearance”), scurf (“skin disease; dandruff”). Compare also cruft, crufty (“of inferior quality”); gruff (“rough, unpolished”).

Questions about cruff

What does cruff mean?
Cruff means crude, rough, uncouth, tough.
What part of speech is cruff?
Cruff can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near cruff in the dictionary

  1. cruet set
  2. cruet sets
  3. cruets
  4. Cruey
  5. Crueys
  6. cruff
  7. cruffin
  8. cruffins
  9. cruffs
  10. crufomate
  11. cruft

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cruff (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: “cruff.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cruff. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.