Word of the Day:

"Three or four decades ago, the newspaperman was appealingly raffish—at once a bum who drank too much and a knight-errant who charged unafraid at social injustice, succored the weak, and crossed lances with the powerful and arrogant." — David Wingrave, Harper's Magazine, 24 Oct. 2025

More example sentences

Raffish combines the English noun raff with the suffix -ish, which in this case means "characteristic of": when we use the word raffish, we literally mean "resembling raff." But what exactly is raff? You might be more familiar with raff's synonym, riffraff, which refers to disreputable people of low social status. Despite the resemblance, these two nouns are distinct in origin. Raff comes directly from the Middle English raf, meaning "rubbish," while riffraff descends from the Anglo-French rif e raf, meaning "altogether." The similarities between raff and riffraff prompted people to start using the two words as synonyms, and raff gained a "rabble" sense. It was that ragtag raff that gave rise to the adjective raffish in the late 1700s.