ziff

See also: Ziff

English

Etymology 1

Noun

ziff (plural ziffs)

1. (Australia, New Zealand, slang, dated) A beard.
   • 1973, Max Harris, The Angry Eye, Sydney, N.S.W.: Pergamon Press, →ISBN, page 116:

     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.

   1. (metonymically) Someone with a beard, especially an old man.
      • 1936 February, “Certain Things for Certain Jobs”, in American Gas Association Monthly, volume XVIII, number 2, New York, N.Y.: American Gas Association, →OCLC, page 61; republished from Australian Gas News, n.d.:

        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.

Etymology 2

Noun

ziff (plural ziffs)

1. (UK, slang, obsolete) A juvenile thief.
   • 1846, George William MacArthur Reynolds, The Mysteries of London, page 60:

     […] Y was a Yoxter that eat caper sauce; / Z was a Ziff who was flashed on the horse.

References

• Jonathon Green (2024) “ziff n.¹”, in Green’s Dictionary of Slang
• Jonathon Green (2024) “ziff n.²”, in Green’s Dictionary of Slang
• “ziff, n.”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, launched 2000.
• John Camden Hotten (1873) The Slang Dictionary