One of the little joys of life is Anu Garg’s A Word A Day. You can have a new vocabulary word, usually in a weekly theme, arrive in your inbox daily. What a treat. Today’s word is one of my favorites:
chuffed (chuft) adjective
Pleased; satisfied.
[From English dialect chuff (pleased, puffed, swollen with pride).]
Displeased; annoyed.
[From chuff (boor, churl), from Middle English chuffe.]
The theme this week is words that simultaneously have opposite meanings. I always use it in the first sense, as in “I am totally chuffed about this cool series of articles that Mike and I are writing!”
I love words like this. I didn’t know about that first meaning of chuff.
One of my faves is “cleave” which means both “To split with or as if with a sharp instrument” and “To adhere, cling, or stick fast.”