Word.ws English Dictionary

STIF

STIF noun: a gay man seen as exhibiting heterosexual manners or attitudes.

Noun

STIF (plural STIFs)

  1. (dated, slang) A gay man seen as exhibiting heterosexual manners or attitudes.
    • If there's "male hatred' in my book it's directed at those same attitudes in gay males who are […] still permeated with such solipsistic male assumptions, like those of our fathers and forefathers, that the world is for them alone and that it revolves around them, STIFFS, as they were once called...1982 April 24, Michael Rumaker, “Zephyrs”, in Gay Community News, page 5

Forms of STIF

pluralSTIFs
alternative formSTIFF

Origin of STIF

Modified acronym of "straight-identified faggot". Punning on the slang sense of stiff, "a conventionalist person".

Questions about STIF

What does STIF mean?
STIF means a gay man seen as exhibiting heterosexual manners or attitudes.
What part of speech is STIF?
STIF is a noun.
What is the plural of STIF?
The plural of STIF is STIFs.

Words near STIF in the dictionary

  1. Stieltjes constants
  2. Stierwalt
  3. Stierwalts
  4. sties
  5. stiesful
  6. STIF
  7. stifado
  8. stifados
  9. stiff
  10. stiff 'un
  11. stiff 'uns

Source and license

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