chaffy

comparative chaffier · superlative chaffiest

1. Like or containing chaff.

   He chewed the chaffy end of a wheat stalk.

   2016, Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing, Penguin Books (2017), page 72

   2 more examples

   A mighty fountain […] / Amid whose swift half-intermitted Burst / Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, / Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:

   1816, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan

   The burning, pungent scent of newly threshed wheat and a chaffy dust enveloped the village.

   1940, Mikhail Sholokhov, chapter 6, in Stephen Garry, transl., The Don Flows Home to the Sea, section 1, pages 44-45

2. biology(of bracts, flower head receptacles, scales on cones or catkins) Resembling chaff: papery, husk-like; not fleshy, leafy or herbaceous.
3. agriculture(of an ear of corn/maize) Having imperfectly developed kernels that are not tightly compressed against each other.
4. obsoleteOf as little value or substance as chaff; worthless.

   […] thou ly’st, and art / A very theefe in love, a Chaffy Lord / Nor worth the name of villaine:

   1634, John Fletcher and William Shakespeare, “Act 3”, in The Two Noble Kinsmen, page 36

   1 more example

   […] the most slight and chaffy opinion, if at a great remove from the present age, contracts such an esteem and veneration, that it out-weighs what is infinitly more ponderous and rational, of a modern date.

   1661, Joseph Glanvill, chapter 15, in The Vanity of Dogmatizing, page 137

   Synonyms: strawlike, two-bit, valueless, bastardly, blown, cacky, cocking, crapalicious

comparative chaffier · superlative chaffiest

1. archaiccolloquialFull of banter or badinage; joking, playful.First known use mid-19ᵗʰ c.

   Gerald did not seem to mind the chaffy talk and the vulgar jokes, and would generally join in […].

   1916, Dorothy Richardson, Backwater

   1 more example

   He would talk for an hour; then he would half-draw, and talk again, and often blow his horn when there was no manner of occasion—always so chaffy.

   1859, Henry Hall Dixon (as “The Druid”), chapter 1, in Silk and Scarlet, pages 58-59