Toff

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (December 2009)

This article does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (January 2009)

Look up toff in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

In British English slang, a toff is a mildly derogatory term for someone with an aristocratic background, particularly someone who exudes an air of superiority. For instance, The Toff, a character from the series of adventure novels by John Creasey is an upper-class crime sleuth, who uses a common caricature of a toff - a line drawing with a top hat, monocle, bow-tie and cigarette with a holder - as his calling card.

A person can be classed as a toff if they are considered to be slightly better off than the general population. There are cases of mild bullying where, for example, someone from a poorer area such as a council estate will use the word to describe people either from a different part of that county or from a more privileged upbringing. This sort of name calling is normally accompanied by an attempt at mimicking a very upper-class aristocratic accent.

Normally it is something simple that can spark a tendency for people to use the word, like a family moving from a small rural town to a larger one. Perhaps because the area they have come did not have an influx of people from different parts of the country, and because they don't sound like a local, they will often find they will be classed automatically as upper-class and posh, and possibly named as toffs.

The word toff is thought to come from the word tuft, which was a gold tassel worn by titled undergraduates at Oxford University or Cambridge University.^[1]

See also

• Nobby Clark

References

This vocabulary-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v • d • e