caff

English

Etymology

Clipping of cafeteria.

Pronunciation

• (British) IPA^(key): /kæf/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -æf

Noun

caff (plural caffs)

1. (Britain, Ireland, slang) café, cafeteria.

   Synonyms: caf; see also Thesaurus:restaurant

   • 1912, Stephen Leacock, “The Hostelry of Mr. Smith”, in Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, page 27:

     No one in Mariposa had ever seen anything like the caff. All down the side of it were the grill fires, with great pewter dish covers that went up and down on a chain, […] ; you could watch a buckwheat pancake whirled into existence under your eyes and see fowls' legs devilled, peppered, grilled, and tormented till they lost all semblance of the original Mariposa chicken.

   • 2012, Suzanne Hall, City, Street and Citizen, Routledge, →ISBN, page 52:

     After working his way up in restaurant kitchens, Nick's father bought a caff off the Walworth Road, and named it The Bosphorus in homage to a cultural homeland elsewhere.

   • 2022, Liam McIlvanney, The Heretic, page 200:

     McCormack dressed in his second-best suit and walked down the hill to a caff on Dumbarton Road.

Middle English

Noun

caff

1. Alternative form of chaf

Scots

Etymology 1

From Middle English calf (“young cow”).

Noun

caff

1. Alternative form of cauf (“calf (young cow)”)

Etymology 2

From Middle English caf, caff, kaf, kaff, alternative forms of chaf.

Alternative forms

• cauf, cawf, calf, cauff, kaff

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /kaf/, /kɑːf/

Noun

caff (uncountable)

1. Chaff; the parts of harvested grain not usable as food, especially straw or husks.

References

• “caff, n.”, in The Dictionary of the Scots Language, Edinburgh: Scottish Language Dictionaries, 2004–present, →OCLC, retrieved 15 February 2019, reproduced from W[illiam] Grant and D[avid] D. Murison, editors, The Scottish National Dictionary, Edinburgh: Scottish National Dictionary Association, 1931–1976, →OCLC.