tiffin
Syllables: tif·fin/ˈtɪf.ɪn/
More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations
India/ʈɪ.fɪn/
tiffin noun: a (light) midday meal or snack; luncheon.
Noun
tiffin (countable and uncountable, plural tiffins)
- A (light) midday meal or snack; luncheon.
- He took his tiffin from home and ate the food two hours later in school.
- […] I bought a pine-apple at the same time, which I gave to Sambo. Let's have it for tiffin; very cool and nice this hot weather.1847 January – 1848 July, William Makepeace Thackeray, “The Green Silk Purse”, in Vanity Fair […], London: Bradbury and Evans […], published 1848, →OCLC, page 31
- A box or container used to carry a tiffin.
- "Young memsahib, an empty tiffin box costs ten rupees in the market. With the food, it's worth maybe fifteen rupees. Do you think I could retire after I steal it?" the man said. “I'm getting late. Do you want your husband to get his lunch or not? That last one's for him, isn't it?" He jerked his...2011, Mahtab Narsimhan, The Tiffin, Toronto, Ont.: Dancing Cat Books, →ISBN
- A cake-like confection composed of crushed biscuits, sugar, syrup, raisins, cherries and cocoa powder, often covered with a layer of melted chocolate.
Verb
tiffin (third-person singular simple present tiffins, present participle tiffining, simple past and past participle tiffined)
- To eat a (light) midday meal or snack.
- Do you know that he tiffins with her three times a week, and every night, after leaving here, he finishes the evening in her society, sitting in the veranda and smoking cigarettes till all hours.1884, B[ithia] M[ary] Croker, Pretty Miss Neville. A Novel. (Harper's Franklin Square Library; no. 363), New York, N.Y.: Harper & Bros., →OCLC, page 328
- Pack had been tiffining by himself to the right of the arch, and had heard everything.1888, Rudyard Kipling, “The Bisara of Pooree”, in Plain Tales from the Hills, Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co.; London: W. Thacker & Co., →OCLC, page 223
- Synonyms:
- tiff
Proper noun capitalized: Tiffin
Tiffin (countable and uncountable, plural Tiffins)
- A surname.
- A small city in Johnson County, Iowa, United States.
- An unincorporated community in St. Clair County, Missouri, United States.
- A city, the county seat of Seneca County, Ohio, United States.
tiffin meaning in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Kannada
tiffin in Hindi
- tiffin
- टिफ़िन ṭifin
tiffin in Tamil
- சிற்றுண்டி, சிற்றுணவு
tiffin in Telugu
- tiffin
- టిఫిను ṭiphinu
tiffin in Kannada
- ತಿಂಡಿ, ತಿನಿಸು
More languagesFewer languages
- tiffin in Gujarati
- ટિફિન ṭiphin
Examples of tiffin in a sentence
- That garden belongs to Manockjee Metta; that day many of us met and had tiffin and supper.1845, A Detailed Report of the Proceedings on the Trial of the Eighteen Parsee Prisoners for Murder, before the Supreme Court, Bombay, on...
- Had tiffin at 11.30 a.m. 1½ rations of rice with fried fish.2004, Harry Berry, My Darling Wife, or, How I Passed the Time of Day Between 18th April 1940 and 5th November 1945: Being the Unexpurgated...
- Often thought of as a snack taken with afternoon tea, tiffin is actually a light lunch eaten at midday.2008, Sarah Murray, Moveable Feasts: From Ancient Rome to the 21st Century, the Incredible Journeys of the Food We Eat, New York, N.Y....
- Tiffin work started with Raghunath Medge's father, who worked first of all at Bombay Churchgate station.2013, Sara Roncaglia, Feeding the City: Work and Food Culture of the Mumbai Dabbawalas, Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, →DOI, →ISBN, page...
Synonyms of tiffin
Forms of tiffin
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| plural | tiffins |
| Verb | |
| third-person singular present | tiffins |
| present participle | tiffining |
| past participle | tiffined |
| past | tiffined |
| Proper noun | |
| plural | Tiffins |
Origin of tiffin
Apparently from English tiffing, present participle of tiff (“to take a small drink, to sip”) (slang).
Words that rhyme with tiffin
Questions about tiffin
- What does tiffin mean?
- Tiffin means a (light) midday meal or snack; luncheon.
- What is tiffin in Hindi?
- Tiffin in Hindi is टिफ़िन (ṭifin). See Tiffin meaning in Hindi.
- How do you use tiffin in a sentence?
- That garden belongs to Manockjee Metta; that day many of us met and had tiffin and supper.
- What part of speech is tiffin?
- Tiffin can be a noun, a verb or a proper noun.
- How do you pronounce tiffin?
- Tiffin is pronounced /ʈɪ.fɪn/ (India).
- What is the plural of tiffin?
- The plural of tiffin is tiffins.
Words near tiffin in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: tiffin (page history and authors); Tiffin (page history and authors); टिफ़िन (Hindi) (page history and authors); tiffin (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); టిఫిను (Telugu) (page history and authors); tiffin (Kannada Wiktionary) (page history and authors); ટિફિન (Gujarati) (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-uk-tiffin.opus.
Cite this entry: “tiffin.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tiffin. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.