Noun: riff
Sample Sentences
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Listen to one of the greatest guitar riffs of all time!
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Jimi Hendrix's Voodoo Child has been named the greatest guitar riff of all time, 41 years after it was recorded, in a poll by website Music Radar. [2009 November 27, “Jimi Hendrix's Voodoo Child has 'best guitar riff'”, in BBC:]
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Pope Francis delivers off-the-cuff riff on family life [2015 September 27, “Pope Francis delivers off-the-cuff riff on family life”, in USA Today:]
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Both the Orbit and the Pinnacle are riffs on an idea sketched out in 1917 by Vladimir Tatlin for a monument to international communism. [2012, The Economist, London Skyline: Tower Power:]
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Grok’s companions are a riff on the idea of AI assistants or agents, which some people use for friendship or romance in place of or in addition to human partners. [2025 July 16, David Ingram, “Musk's Grok 'companions' include a flirty anime character and an anti-religion panda”, in NBC News:]
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The creative team has experience with spoofing: Both [Paul] Rudd and [Amy] Poehler had parts in [David] Wain’s Wet Hot American Summer, a hysterically irreverent riff on ’80s summer-camp comedies. [2014 June 26, A. A. Dowd, “Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler Spoof Rom-com Clichés in They Came Together”, in The A.V. Club, archived from the original on 07 Dec 2017:]
Nouns inflected like riff
soldier's woundwort,
Nicosian,
whopper,
greypate,
tactile sign language,
chronotrope,
Rosie Lee,
dissentient,
photoinactivator,
sulphonediimine,
coastal waterfall,
residuary devise,
bituminization,
nitrosonaphthol,
smṛiti,
geosphere,
backscreen,
mensuralist,
flocculate,
flocculant, etc. (List truncated at 20 nouns)
Etymology
Uncertain. Perhaps a clipping of riffle, or an alteration of refrain.
Verbs referencing "riff"
Latin Nouns
corpus, English Nouns
corps, Dutch Nouns
riff, French Nouns
riff, Finnish Nouns
riffi.