stiff

CEFRB1

/stɪf/

adjective

Türkçe translations

Translating…

In plain English

  1. 01

    adjective

    Firm and difficult to bend or move.

  2. 02

    adjective

    Extra detail

    Formal in behavior; unrelaxed.

Examples

  • Shoes are stiff when they are new.

  • He was stiff about it.

At a glance

Sits at B1 on the CEFR scale

Senses
5
Parts of speech
1
Citations
5
Synonyms
5

Deep Dive

adjective

Extra meanings

  1. Inflexible; rigid.

  2. Rigid; hard to bend; inflexible.

  3. Painful or more rigid than usual as a result of excessive or unaccustomed exercise.

More examples

In context

  • He was eventually caught, and given a stiff fine.

  • My legs are stiff after climbing that hill yesterday.

  • A sheet of stiff black cardboard

Synonyms

Antonyms

Quick test

Two questions on this entry. Nothing is scored.

Question 1 · Quick check

After staying in the freezer, the towel became blank and hard to fold.

Practise this properly in the app, where the word comes back before you forget it.

Nearby

Origin

adjective

From Middle English stiff, stiffe, stif, from Old English stīf, from Proto-West Germanic *stīf, from Proto-Germanic *stīfaz, from Proto-Indo-European *steypós. See also West Frisian stiif, Dutch stijf, Norwegian Bokmål stiv, German steif; also Latin stīpes, stīpō, from which English stevedore. The expected Modern English form would be /staɪf/; /stɪf/ is probably originally from compounds such as stiffly, where the vowel was shortened before a consonant cluster.