Word.ws English Dictionary

off-the-cuff

off-the-cuff adjective: extemporaneous; without prior preparation; spontaneous; impromptu.

Adjective

off-the-cuff (not comparable)

  1. (idiomatic) Extemporaneous; without prior preparation; spontaneous; impromptu.
    • He made a few off-the-cuff remarks before launching into his prepared speech.
    • Off-the-Cuff Obama Line Put U.S. in Bind on Syria [title]2013 May 5, Peter Baker, Mark Landler, David E. Sanger, Anne Barnard, “Off-the-Cuff Obama Line Put U.S. in Bind on Syria”, in The New York Times, →ISSN

Examples of off-the-cuff in a sentence

  • Trump’s Off-the-Cuff Tweets Strain Foreign Ties [title]2017 June 4, Peter Baker, “Trump’s Off-the-Cuff Tweets Strain Foreign Ties”, in The New York Times, →ISSN:
  • Even when people are trying to sell you something, their messages seem off-the-cuff, like trustworthy recommendations rather than sponsored shilling.2021 October 2, John Herrman, “Will TikTok Make You Buy It?”, in The New York Times, →ISSN:

Synonyms of off-the-cuff

2 more synonymsFewer synonyms

Origin of off-the-cuff

From the prepositional phrase off the cuff.

Questions about off-the-cuff

What does off-the-cuff mean?
Off-the-cuff means extemporaneous; without prior preparation; spontaneous; impromptu.
How do you use off-the-cuff in a sentence?
Trump’s Off-the-Cuff Tweets Strain Foreign Ties [title]
What part of speech is off-the-cuff?
Off-the-cuff is an adjective.

Words near off-the-cuff in the dictionary

  1. off-target
  2. off-the-air
  3. off-the-ball
  4. off-the-books
  5. off-the-charts
  6. off-the-cuff
  7. off-the-grid
  8. off-the-gridder
  9. off-the-gridders
  10. off-the-peg
  11. off-the-rack

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: off-the-cuff (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-au-off-the-cuff.ogg.

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