faff
verb/fæf/
/fæf/
[intransitive] (British English, informal)Verb Forms
| present simple I / you / we / they faff | /fæf/ /fæf/ |
| he / she / it faffs | /fæfs/ /fæfs/ |
| past simple faffed | /fæft/ /fæft/ |
| past participle faffed | /fæft/ /fæft/ |
| -ing form faffing | /ˈfæfɪŋ/ /ˈfæfɪŋ/ |
- to spend time doing things in a way that is not well organized and that does not achieve much
- faff about/around Stop faffing about and get on with it!
- faff (with something) I've spent much of the day faffing with my new phone, trying to get it to work like the old one did.
Word Originlate 18th cent. (originally dialect in the sense ‘blow in puffs’, describing the wind): imitative. The current sense may have been influenced by dialect faffle ‘stammer, stutter’, later ‘flap in the wind’, which came to mean ‘fuss, dither’ at about the same time as faff (late 19th cent.).Want to learn more?
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