Whiff

How to spell whiff

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce whiff

What does whiff mean?

1. nounA faint trace of a smell carried briefly on the air.
2. verbTo catch or give off a faint smell, or informally to swing at and miss something.

Whiff in a sentence

• noun

  A whiff of fresh coffee drifted in from the kitchen.

• verb

  If you whiff at the ball again, the coach will bench you.

• noun

  She caught a whiff of smoke and checked the toaster.

• verb

  The leftover fish began to whiff after a day on the counter.

Where does whiff come from?

Language of origin: Other

Whiff first appears in English in the sixteenth century as an imitative word, that is, one coined to echo the sound it names: the soft puff of breath or moving air made when something is blown or sniffed. It probably grew out of earlier forms such as 'weffe' or 'whef', themselves built to suggest a quick gust, and the breathy 'wh-' opening reinforces that sense of expelled air. From the literal idea of a puff of air or smoke it broadened to mean a faint trace of a smell carried on such a current, which is the everyday meaning today. The same gusty logic gave rise to figurative uses, as in 'a whiff of scandal', meaning a slight hint of something. Because the word is built from sound rather than from Latin or Greek roots, its spelling is fixed by convention: the short vowel is followed by a doubled 'f', and the silent-feeling 'wh-' must not be dropped to a plain 'w'.

How the word is built

• whiff (a single imitative root; no prefix or suffix, the spelling doubles the f after a short vowel)