Scarf

How to spell scarf

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce scarf

What does scarf mean?

1. nounA length of fabric worn around the neck or head for warmth or decoration.
2. verbTo eat something hurriedly and greedily.

Scarf in a sentence

• noun

  She wrapped a woollen scarf around her neck before walking to the station.

• verb

  The kids will scarf their lunch in minutes if you let them.

• noun

  He lost his favourite silk scarf on the train home.

• verb

  He tends to scarf his breakfast on the way out the door.

Where does scarf come from?

Language of origin: French

The garment sense of scarf entered English in the mid 1500s, probably from the Old Northern French escarpe, meaning a sash or a sling worn across the body, which is related to the word for a pilgrim's purse hung from the neck. Earlier still the trail leads back to a Germanic source connected to the idea of a strip or fragment of cloth. Over time the meaning narrowed from a broad sash to the familiar band of fabric worn around the neck or head for warmth or decoration. A quite separate carpentry sense, the scarf joint that splices two lengths of timber end to end, comes from an Old Norse root meaning a notch or groove, and the two words simply fell together in spelling. The informal verb meaning to eat hastily is a much later American development, possibly an alteration of an older dialect word scoff meaning to gobble food.

How the word is built

• scarf (single root; no productive prefix or suffix)