Word.ws English Dictionary

saffian

saffian noun: a leather made from goatskins or sheepskins which is tanned with sumac and then brightly dyed.

Noun

saffian (countable and uncountable, plural saffians)

  1. A leather made from goatskins or sheepskins which is tanned with sumac and then brightly dyed.
    • One of the three volumes Cyby had brought was as large as the top of a small table […]; from the arms impressed upon its saffian cover, I supposed it to be the history of some old noble family.1980, Gene Wolfe, chapter VI, in The Shadow of the Torturer (The Book of the New Sun; 1), New York: Simon & Schuster, →ISBN, page 67

Forms of saffian

pluralsaffians

Origin of saffian

From Russian сафья́н (safʹján).

Questions about saffian

What does saffian mean?
Saffian means a leather made from goatskins or sheepskins which is tanned with sumac and then brightly dyed.
What part of speech is saffian?
Saffian is a noun.
What is the plural of saffian?
The plural of saffian is saffians.

Words near saffian in the dictionary

  1. Saffells
  2. Saffer
  3. saffern
  4. Saffers
  5. saffi
  6. saffian
  7. saffians
  8. Saffie
  9. Saffir
  10. Saffir-Simpson scale
  11. saffire

Source and license

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