Word.ws English Dictionary

half staff

half staff is the alternative form of half-staff.

Meaning of half-staff

Noun

half-staff (plural half-staffs)

  1. (Canada, Philippines, US, sometimes) Half-mast.
    • [T]he agents of the steamship lines drowned their sorrow in rum and ran the house flags to half-staff.c. 1900, Richard Harding Davis, Billy and the Big Stick

Forms of half staff

pluralhalf staffs

Questions about half staff

What is half staff the alternative form of?
Half staff is the alternative form of half-staff.

Words near half staff in the dictionary

  1. half sovereigns
  2. half space
  3. half spaces
  4. half stack
  5. half stacks
  6. half staff
  7. half staffs
  8. half step
  9. half steps
  10. half term
  11. half terms

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: half staff (page history and authors); half-staff (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: “half staff.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/half_staff. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.