huff

C2+ Topic:General Vocabulary

US /hʌf/ UK /hʌf/ See IPA manual

Meanings

1

noun
a fit of petty annoyance or to blow with puffs of breath

She left the room in a huff after the argument.

Thesaurus

Synonyms

1 noun · a fit of petty annoyance or... pique sulk tantrum puff pant blowsnit

Word family

Derived forms huffyhuffilyhuffiness

Etymology

Of imitative origin, echoing the sound of an exhaled breath of annoyance; first recorded in the 16th century.

huff onomatopoeic

View etymology graph ->

Topics

General Vocabulary

External links

# huff

**Type:** Word
**Level:** C2+
**Part of speech:** noun
**IPA (US):** /hʌf/
**IPA (UK):** /hʌf/

## Meanings
1. a fit of petty annoyance or to blow with puffs of breath

## Examples
- She left the room in a huff after the argument.

## Synonyms
- pique
- sulk
- tantrum
- puff
- pant
- blow
- snit

## Derived Forms
- huffy
- huffily
- huffiness

## Roots and Affixes
- Root: huff

## Etymology
Of imitative origin, echoing the sound of an exhaled breath of annoyance; first recorded in the 16th century.

## AI Etymology
huff is of imitative origin, echoing the sound of an exhaled breath of annoyance; first recorded in the 16th century. The history explains the modern form through the named earlier word or formation, without requiring a separate speculative ancestry. The etymology remains cautious where the history is cautious: comparisons, echoic formation, or disputed derivation do not make the ancestry more definite than the forms actually named. In present English, the noun sense is "a fit of petty annoyance or to blow with puffs of breath", so the historical development ends in a clearly identifiable modern dictionary use. The same base also remains productive in derivatives such as huffy, huffily, and huffiness. Its semantic neighborhood includes pique, sulk, tantrum, and puff, which helps locate the modern sense without adding a separate etymological claim. The named historical forms include onomatopoeic huff.

## Topics
- General Vocabulary

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