Joe Hildebrand excitedly told me about a new word he had come across while doing a Times cryptic crossword puzzle – the word ‘niff’. But is there really any such word?  It turns out that ‘niff’ is an English regional dialect word first recorded in 1900 meaning ‘a bad smell’. It’s listed in The Public School Word-book compiled by J. S. Farmer.  And that source makes sense.  Clearly this started out as schoolboy slang. The official definition says ‘niff’ means, ‘To emit an odour or smell, especially an unpleasant one; to stink’ (Oxford English Dictionary). And we can imagine a situation in which smart-alec schoolboys would coin a neat little word such as ‘niff’ to say that someone (or some place) stinks – ‘that really niffs.’  The word can be both a noun and a verb. Where did the schoolboys get their idea for the word?  Well, the Oxford suggests that (perhaps) it is a variant or alteration of another word – and they suggest that ‘sniff’ or ‘whiff’ might be the source.  The most likely of these is ‘sniff’ with what the Oxford calls the ‘unexplained dropping of the initial “s”’. Or perhaps (because they can’t quite make up their minds) it was formed from ‘whiff’ by what they call ‘blending’ with some (now lost) word that had an initial ‘n’.

You can see how this has made them chew the ends of their pens and think for a bit. But it’s a nice little word to add to our (ever growing) vocabularies. And it’s a good one to try to work into your conversation sometime this week. When something is on the nose, try telling people it’s a bit ‘niffy’.