duff
adjective (duff — informal, UK); noun (the duff — slang); verb («duff up» — slang, UK)
Everyday
- (informal, UK) Duff means bad, useless or not working: a duff battery, a duff idea. tree →
- (slang, mainly US) Your duff is your bottom; «get off your duff» means stop being lazy. tree →
- (slang, UK) To duff someone up is to beat them up. tree →
- A duff is an old-fashioned word for a kind of steamed pudding, as in plum duff. tree →
In the lessons
It appears in casual talk and stories with real speech, telling the reader that something is faulty or poor. Phrases: a duff note (a wrong note in music), duff advice, get off your duff, duff up.
Examples
- This torch is duff — the batteries must be flat. tree →
- He played a duff note in the middle of the song. tree →
- That was a duff idea, Tom. tree →
- (US slang) Get off your duff and help me clean up! tree →
- (UK slang) The bully threatened to duff him up. tree →
- We got a duff calculator that kept giving wrong answers. tree →
- Grandma made plum duff for pudding. tree →
Note
Informal or slang in all modern senses; not for exam writing — say «faulty», «useless» or «poor». «Duff up» is about violence; it is not a nice phrase. Not related to «dough».
On Mova
- Trees and pragmatics of «duff» in the school dictionary: every meaning and example parsed by Mova, with its dependency tree and frames.
- «duff» in the school dictionary on Mova free.
This page in Markdown → https://md.dictionary.elamur.ai/free/en/english/duff/