Word of the Day

: March 4, 2011

raffish

adjective RAF-ish

What It Means

1 : marked by or suggestive of flashy vulgarity or crudeness

2 : marked by a careless unconventionality : rakish

raffish in Context

Gina often seemed to be attracted to the raffish and rebellious boys, rather than the quiet intellectuals in her classes.

"They rode a bus a few stops and got off in the raffish suburb of Chelsea, a low-rent neighborhood of artists and writers." -- From Ken Follett's 2010 novel Fall of Giants

Did You Know?

"Raffish" sounds like it should mean "resembling raff." But what is raff? Originally, "raff" was a word meaning "rubbish"; it derived from Middle English "raf," and it was being used for trash and refuse back in the 1400s. Around a century later, English speakers were also using the word "riffraff" to mean "disreputable characters" or "rabble." The origins of "riffraff" are distinct from the "rubbish" sense of "raff"; "riffraff" derived from an Anglo-French phrase meaning "one and all." By the mid-1500s, the similarities between "raff" and "riffraff" had prompted people to start using the two words as synonyms, and "raff" gained a "rabble" sense. It was that ragtag "raff" that gave rise to the adjective "raffish" in the late 1700s.