Whiff vs Chiff - What's the difference?
whiff | chiff |
A waft; a brief, gentle breeze; a light gust of air
An odour carried briefly through the air
* (rfdate)
* 1922 , (Virginia Woolf), Chapter 2
A short inhalation of breath, especially of smoke from a cigarette or pipe
* Longfellow
(figurative) a slight sign of something; a glimpse
* 2012 , Ben Smith, Leeds United 2-1 Everton [http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/19632366]
(baseball) A strike (from the batter’s perspective)
The megrim, a fish .
To waft.
To sniff.
(baseball) To strike out.
(slang) to attempt to strike and miss, especially being off-balance/vulnerable after missing.
To throw out in whiffs; to consume in whiffs; to puff.
To carry or convey by a whiff, or as by a whiff; to puff or blow away.
* Ben Jonson
(colloquial) Having a strong or unpleasant odor.
* 2002: Jim Rozen, Way oil in
(music) The characteristic sound made as part of the attack of certain notes on the organ.
*1998 , Fletcher, N.H. and Rossing, T.D, The Physics of Musical Instruments , Springer Science & Business Media, page 570
*:In all these adjustments, the voicer must have regard to the steady sound of the pipe, to its promptness of speech, and to the presence or absence of any desired starting transient or chiff .
As nouns the difference between whiff and chiff
is that whiff is a waft; a brief, gentle breeze; a light gust of air while chiff is the characteristic sound made as part of the attack of certain notes on the organ.As a verb whiff
is to waft.As an adjective whiff
is having a strong or unpleasant odor.whiff
English
Noun
(en noun)- everyone has always known, widely promiscuous heterosexual men have, as I say, a whiff of the bathhouse about them.
- A whiff of rotten eggs had vanquished the pale clouded yellows which came pelting across the orchard and up Dods Hill and away on to the moor
- The skipper, he blew a whiff from his pipe, / And a scornful laugh laughed he.
- This was a rare whiff of the big-time for a club whose staple diet became top-flight football for so long - the glamour was in short supply, however. Thousands of empty seats and the driving Yorkshire rain saw to that.
Synonyms
* puff * sniff * waftVerb
(en verb)- Old Empedocles, who, when he leaped into Etna, having a dry, sear body, and light, the smoke took him, and whiffed him up into the moon.
Adjective
(en adjective)rec.crafts.metalworking
- Whoo boy that gear oil is pretty whiff . If you actually do this, spend the extra money for the synthetic gear oil as it will not have as bad a sulfur stink as the regular stuff.