Ziff
name, noun, slang ·1 syllable ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 A beard. Australia, New-Zealand, dated, slang
"The building style can be described as Stalinist Ceremonial at its most relaxed. That is, the external visual impression is as if some comedian had memorialised the moral fixities of Sir Henry Bolte and decorated the result with the late lamented Joe Stalin's ziff."
- 2 A juvenile thief. UK, obsolete, slang
"[…] Y was a Yoxter that eat caper sauce; / Z was a Ziff who was flashed on the horse."
- 3 A beard.; Someone with a beard, especially an old man. Australia, New-Zealand, dated, metonymically, slang
"Now he wanted to use electric heat, and electricity was found wanting, and he couldn't understand the difference. Surely if a thing would do all that he had made it do, it should be able to boil water—it was hard to think that "stuff" which some old "ziff" had discovered over a hundred years ago was still better for some jobs than electricity."
- 1 A surname from Hebrew.
Example
More examples"The building style can be described as Stalinist Ceremonial at its most relaxed. That is, the external visual impression is as if some comedian had memorialised the moral fixities of Sir Henry Bolte and decorated the result with the late lamented Joe Stalin's ziff."
Etymology
Artificial surname, from Hebrew זִיו (zív, “brightness, radiance, brilliance”).
More for "ziff"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.