chiff
noun
chiff is a noun meaning “The characteristic sound made as part of the attack of certain notes on the organ” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled C-H-I-F-F, and it appears about once in every 76 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of chiff is chiffs.
What does chiff mean?
noun
- 1
The characteristic sound made as part of the attack of certain notes on the organ.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
Forms of chiff
- chiffs plural
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is chiff?
Chiff appears about once in every 76 million words in written English, the 275,970th most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Where does chiff come from?
Onomatopoeic.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).