Word.ws English Dictionary

ziff

ziff noun: a beard.

Noun (1)

ziff (plural ziffs)

  1. (Australia, New Zealand, dated, slang) A beard.
    • As for my trip to the Never Never, well, one lives and learns. I landed safely among a tribe of blacks, and asked an old buck with a white ziff if the 'Marys' of his tribe used paint and powder. He answered with an exceedingly broad nigger grin that 'they use'm charcoal.'1934 April 26, The Chronicle, Adelaide, page 59, column 2
    • The building style can be described as Stalinist Ceremonial at its most relaxed. That is, the external visual impression is as if some comedian had memorialised the moral fixities of Sir Henry Bolte and decorated the result with the late lamented Joe Stalin's ziff.1973, Max Harris, The Angry Eye, Sydney, N.S.W.: Pergamon Press, →ISBN, page 116
    1. (Australia, New Zealand, dated, metonymically, slang) Someone with a beard, especially an old man.
      • Now he wanted to use electric heat, and electricity was found wanting, and he couldn't understand the difference. Surely if a thing would do all that he had made it do, it should be able to boil water—it was hard to think that "stuff" which some old "ziff" had discovered over a hundred years ago...1936 February, “Certain Things for Certain Jobs”, in American Gas Association Monthly, volume XVIII, number 2, New York, N.Y.: American Gas Association, →OCLC, page 61; republished from Australian...

Noun (2)

ziff (plural ziffs)

  1. (UK, obsolete, slang) A juvenile thief.
    • […] Y was a Yoxter that eat caper sauce; / Z was a Ziff who was flashed on the horse.1846, George William MacArthur Reynolds, The Mysteries of London, page 60

Proper noun capitalized: Ziff

Ziff (plural Ziffs)

  1. A surname from Hebrew.

Forms of ziff

Noun
pluralziffs
Proper noun
pluralZiffs

Origin of ziff

Artificial surname, from Hebrew זִיו (zív, “brightness, radiance, brilliance”).

Words that rhyme with ziff

28 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about ziff

What does ziff mean?
Ziff means a beard.
What part of speech is ziff?
Ziff can be a noun or a proper noun.
What is the plural of ziff?
The plural of ziff is ziffs.

Words near ziff in the dictionary

  1. zietrisikites
  2. Zietz
  3. Zietzes
  4. Zieve's syndrome
  5. ZIF
  6. ziff
  7. ziffius
  8. ziffs
  9. zifrosilone
  10. ZIFT
  11. ziftomenib

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ziff (page history and authors); Ziff (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: “ziff.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/ziff. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.