Noun: stiff
| Singular | stiff |
| Plural | stiffs |
Sample Sentences
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working stiff
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The clerk shrugged: “That's the boss's little girl.” “Why, the lucky stiff!” said Keating. “He's been holding out on me.” “You misunderstood me,” the clerk said coldly. “It's his daughter. It's Dominique Francon.” [1943, Ayn Rand, chapter IX, in The Fountainhead:]
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She convinced the stiff to go to her hotel room, where her henchman was waiting to rob him.
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This parrot is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet its maker! This is a late parrot! It's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed it to the perch it would be pushing up the daisies! [1969 December 7, Monty Python, “Full Frontal Nudity, Dead Parrot sketch”, in Monty Python's Flying Circus, spoken by Mr Praline (John Cleese):]
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If the movie was a stiff it wasn't any of their specific faults. They were all in it together and they were jobbed in and jobbed out for two weeks and gone and they got a pile of money for their efforts. [1994, Andy Dougan, The actors' director: Richard Attenborough behind the camera, page 63:]
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They never did sell any records. I don't mean they didn't sell 100,000. I mean they didn't sell 5000. Total. National. Coast-to-coast. The record was a stiff. [2016, Ralph J. Gleason, Toby Gleason, Music in the Air: The Selected Writings of Ralph J. Gleason:]
Nouns inflected like stiff
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
1. Etymology tree
2. Proto-Indo-European *steyp
3. Proto-Germanic *stīfaz
4. Proto-West Germanic *stīf
5. Old English stīf
6. Middle English stif
7. English stiff
8. From Middle English stiff, stiffe, stif, from Old English stīf, from Proto-West Germanic *stīf, from Proto-Germanic *stīfaz, from Proto-Indo-European *steypós.
9. See also West Frisian stiif, Dutch stijf, Norwegian Bokmål stiv, German steif; also Latin stīpes, stīpō, from which English stevedore.
10. The expected Modern English form would be /staɪf/; /stɪf/ is probably originally from compounds such as stiffly, where the vowel was shortened before a consonant cluster. See: Middle English Nouns '
stiff', Latin Nouns '
stīpes'.
Verbs referencing "stiff"
Dutch Nouns
stip, Latin Nouns
stipes, Latin Nouns
stips.