Cuff

How to spell cuff

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce cuff

What does cuff mean?

1. nounThe band of fabric at the end of a sleeve, or the turned-up fold at the bottom of a trouser leg.
2. verbTo hit someone lightly with an open hand.

Cuff in a sentence

• noun

  He tucked the receipt into the cuff of his shirt.

• verb

  The older boy would cuff his brother on the ear when annoyed.

• noun

  The tailor let down the cuff to lengthen the trousers.

• verb

  She watched the cat cuff the toy mouse across the floor.

Where does cuff come from?

Language of origin: Unknown

The origin of cuff is genuinely uncertain, and dictionaries flag it as obscure. The noun appears in late Middle English (around the 1300s to 1400s) as cuffe, where it first meant a glove or mitten rather than the modern band at the end of a sleeve; the sense of a folded edge of a sleeve or trouser leg only settled later. One suggestion connects it to Medieval Latin cuffia or cofia, meaning a close-fitting cap or head covering, the same family that gave us coif. The verb cuff, meaning to strike with the open hand, is recorded from the 1500s and may be a separate word entirely, possibly imitative of a slap or borrowed from a Scandinavian source. Because the two meanings sit on the page identically, the spelling is simple: a short vowel followed by the doubled -ff that single-syllable English words so often take, as in muff, puff, and gruff.

How the word is built

• cuff (a single root word; the doubled -ff is original, not a suffix)