Word.ws English Dictionary

TTFN

TTFN is the initialism of ta-ta for now.

Meaning of ta-ta for now

Interjection

  1. (informal) See ya, laters, (less formal version of) au revoir or till we meet again.
    Synonyms:
    ya, laters

Synonyms of TTFN

Origin of TTFN

In 1939, initialisms, previously rarely used except by the military, were heard more frequently by the British public. ITMA satirised them by coining TTFN, a "pointless" initialism (no easier to say than the phrase on which it was based) to use as a catchphrase, which became widely repeated in the UK. Thirty years later, American ventriloquist Paul Winchell, following the suggestion of his third wife, Jean Freeman, who was British, improvised it as a signature phrase for the (originally British) character Tigger in the Disney films based on A. A. Milne's book The House at Pooh Corner. This, in a world now accustomed to them, popularised worldwide a word originally coined to make fun of initialisms.

Questions about TTFN

What is TTFN the initialism of?
TTFN is the initialism of ta-ta for now.

Words near TTFN in the dictionary

  1. tteokbokki
  2. tteokguk
  3. tteoks
  4. TTF
  5. TTFB
  6. TTFN
  7. TTFT
  8. TTFW
  9. TTG
  10. TTGs
  11. TTH

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: TTFN (page history and authors); ta-ta for now (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: “TTFN.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/ttfn. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.