- (British English, informal) a dirty or untidy personWord Originnoun early 16th cent. (in the sense ‘flakes of skin’): variant of scurf ‘flakes of skin’. The word came to mean ‘worthless thing’, whence the current sense (mid 19th cent.).
Definitions on the go
Look up any word in the dictionary offline, anytime, anywhere with the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary app.
Idioms
See scruff in the Oxford Advanced American Dictionaryby the scruff of the/somebody’s neck
- roughly holding the back of an animal’s or person’s neck
- She grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and threw him out.
- The cat picked up her kitten by the scruff of its neck.
Check pronunciation:
scruff