Word.ws English Dictionary

uffish

/ˈʌfɪʃ/

uffish adjective: grumpy, ill-tempered.

Adjective

uffish (comparative more uffish, superlative most uffish)

  1. (nonce-word) grumpy, ill-tempered
    • And, as in uffish thought he stood, / The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, / Came whiffling through the tulgey wood, / And burbled as it came!1872, Lewis Carroll, Jabberwocky (poem in Through the Looking-Glass)
    • The Bellman looked uffish, and wrinkled his brow.1874–1876 (date written), Lewis Carroll [pseudonym; Charles Lutwidge Dodgson], “Fit the Fit the Fourth.⁠ The Hunting.”, in The Hunting of the Snark […], London: Macmillan and Co., published March...

Forms of uffish

comparativemore uffish
superlativemost uffish

Origin of uffish

Coined by British author and scholar Lewis Carroll. From its sound; Carroll explained the word as "a state of mind when the voice is gruffish, the manner roughish, and the temper huffish."

Questions about uffish

What does uffish mean?
Uffish means grumpy, ill-tempered.
What part of speech is uffish?
Uffish is an adjective.
How do you pronounce uffish?
Uffish is pronounced /ˈʌfɪʃ/.

Words near uffish in the dictionary

  1. uff da
  2. Uffculme
  3. uffda
  4. uffdah
  5. Uffington
  6. uffish
  7. Uffizi
  8. Uffizi Gallery
  9. Ufford
  10. UFH
  11. Ufimian

Source and license

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