faff

Faff is British slang for wasting time on fiddly, pointless fuss. As a noun, a faff is a task that’s more hassle than it should be. “Stop faffing about” means hurry up and get on with it.

What faff means

Merriam-Webster defines the verb as to make a fuss over nothing, and Collins as to dither or fuss. You faff when you can’t decide what to wear, rearrange your bag four times before leaving, or spend twenty minutes finding the right playlist for a ten-minute drive. It’s usually followed by “about” or “around.”

The noun is just as useful. Wiktionary defines a faff as an overcomplicated task, especially one that feels like a waste of time. Renewing a passport is a faff. So is returning anything by post.

Examples

• “Stop faffing around, the taxi’s here.”
• “Assembling that wardrobe was such a faff.”
• “I spent the whole morning faffing about and got nothing done.”

Where it came from

It’s an old dialect word. Merriam-Webster labels it dialectal British and calls it imitative, and Collins dates it to the 19th century. Wiktionary says it originally imitated a puff of wind, and that being “in a faff,” meaning in a flustered state, is recorded in northern England from the 1880s. The sense of fussing about grew from there.

For American readers

There’s no perfect American match. “Dawdle” covers the slowness, “fuss” covers the fiddling, and “hassle” covers the noun. Faff manages all three in one short word.

Related terms

• Knackered: how you feel after a big faff.
• Dodgy: unreliable.
• Bloke: a man.

See more terms like this in our British slang guide.