Toff
//tɒf// noun
noun ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
Noun
- 1 An elegantly dressed person. obsolete
"Last week down our alley came a toff, / Nice old geyser with a nasty cough, / Sees my missus, takes his topper off, / Quite in a gentlemanly way"
- 2 informal term for an upper-class or wealthy person wordnet
- 3 A person of the upper class or with pretensions to it, who usually communicates an air of superiority. Ireland, UK, derogatory
"Now Freddy is young, practically twenty years younger than Higgins: he is a gentleman (or, as Eliza would qualify him, a toff), and speaks like one; […]"
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"Last week down our alley came a toff, / Nice old geyser with a nasty cough, / Sees my missus, takes his topper off, / Quite in a gentlemanly way"
Etymology
Probably an alteration of tuft, referring to the gold tassel on the cap worn by titled undergraduates at English universities.
Related phrases
More for "toff"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.