duff

«duff» in Mova's school dictionary: bad, useless or not working: a duff battery, a duff idea — its meaning for a pupil, its sense in the lessons and examples, with 1 sentence of Mova's corpora that use it.

part of speech

adjective (duff — informal, UK); noun (the duff — slang); verb («duff up» — slang, UK)

meaning for a pupil

1) (informal, UK) Duff means bad, useless or not working: a duff battery, a duff idea. tree →

2) (slang, mainly US) Your duff is your bottom; «get off your duff» means stop being lazy. tree →

3) (slang, UK) To duff someone up is to beat them up. tree →

4) A duff is an old-fashioned word for a kind of steamed pudding, as in plum duff. tree →

sense 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».

In the corpora

• "Up the duff" means pregnant (British slang, rather rude).

Trees and pragmatics

Every meaning and example of «duff» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.