Word.ws English Dictionary

ruffin

/ˈɹʌfɪn/

ruffin adjective: disordered.

Adjective

ruffin (comparative more ruffin, superlative most ruffin)

  1. (obsolete) disordered
    • His ruffin raiment all was staind with blood.1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book I, Canto IV”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, stanza 34

Noun

ruffin (plural ruffins)

  1. (dialectal) A ruffian.
    • So I jest called out to know what was up, and found it was Miss Vanholte's cowboys, who had been forced into the store by them rascally ruffins.1890, Emma E. Hornibrook, Queen of the ranche; or, Life in the Far west, page 150

Proper noun capitalized: Ruffin

Ruffin (plural Ruffins)

  1. A surname.

Forms of ruffin

Adjective
comparativemore ruffin
superlativemost ruffin
Noun
pluralruffins
Proper noun
pluralRuffins

Origin of ruffin

See ruffian.

Questions about ruffin

What does ruffin mean?
Ruffin means disordered.
What part of speech is ruffin?
Ruffin can be an adjective, a noun or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce ruffin?
Ruffin is pronounced /ˈɹʌfɪn/.

Words near ruffin in the dictionary

  1. ruffiano
  2. ruffianos
  3. ruffianous
  4. ruffians
  5. Ruffieux
  6. ruffin
  7. ruffing
  8. Ruffings
  9. Ruffini
  10. Ruffini's corpuscle
  11. Ruffini's corpuscles

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ruffin (page history and authors); Ruffin (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:

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