Word of the Day

: March 4, 2016

zaftig

adjective ZAHF-tig

What It Means

: having a full rounded figure : pleasingly plump

zaftig in Context

"… Marilyn is lucky that … the Hollywood powers at least had the smarts not to put her on a diet. She looked plenty good zaftig." — Bookwormroom.com, 31 May 2012

"But Oprah—now there's a woman who has run the dieting gauntlet over the years. In 1988, she pulled a wagon full of 67 pounds of quivering fat onto the stage to show what she had lost on a liquid diet. Then she ballooned up to 200 pounds after a thyroid malfunction, before running the Marine Corps Marathon at a healthy zaftig size." — Leah McLaren, The Globe and Mail (Canada), 23 Oct. 2015

Did You Know?

Over the centuries, some women have been approvingly described as full-figured, shapely, womanly, curvy, curvaceous, voluptuous, and statuesque. Such women are, in a word, zaftig. Zaftig has been juicing up our language since the 1930s (the same decade that gave us Yiddish-derived futz, hoo-ha, and schmaltz, not to mention lox). It comes from the Yiddish zaftik, which means "juicy" or "succulent" and which in turn derives from zaft, meaning "juice" or "sap."