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Chaff

[chaf, chahf]

Example Sentences Origin

noun

the husks of grains and grasses that are separated during threshing.

straw cut up for fodder.

worthless matter; refuse.

the membranous, usually dry, brittle bracts of the flowers of certain plants.

Also called window. Military. strips of metal foil dropped by an aircraft to confuse enemy radar by creating false blips.

Origin:
before 1000; Middle English chaf, Old English ceaf; cognate with Middle Low German, Dutch kaf

Related forms

chaff·less, adjective

chaff·like, adjective

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Chaff is always a great word to know.

So is interrobang. Does it mean:

a printed punctuation mark (‽), available only in some typefaces, designed to combine the question mark (?) and the exclamation point (!), indicating a mixture of query and interjection, as after a rhetorical question.

a calculus or concretion found in the stomach or intestines of certain animals, esp. ruminants, formerly reputed to be an effective remedy for poison.

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Example Sentences

Found in his apparel were traces of wheat chaff and husks of barley.

They fear further stigmatisation now that the wheat has been formally separated from the chaff.

People were hungry, reduced to eating chaff and weeds.

EXPAND

Found in his apparel were traces of wheat chaff and husks of barley.

They fear further stigmatisation now that the wheat has been formally separated from the chaff.

People were hungry, reduced to eating chaff and weeds.

It's heartening to see only one piece of chaff in the wheat here.

Karzai's aircraft did have a flare and chaff dispensing system.

Allow grits to settle in saucepan, then skim off chaff and hulls that float to surface.

Nothing wrong with separating the wheat from the chaff.

The man showed me how to scoop barley from a chest-high mound, then shake it so that the chaff fell through.

In fact, now the problem was finding the wheat from the chaff.

Time is the element that separates the wheat from the chaff.

It also produces far too many ideas: managers have to spend weeks sorting through the chaff to find a few grains of wheat.

It's surprisingly easy to sift through the chaff for the wheat.

Had there not been so much chaff mixed with the wheat, the entire session would have been one long riot.

Think of it in terms of separating the wheat from the chaff.

Take that and multiply it by the thousands of blogs that exist, and the trouble lies in separating the wheat from the chaff.

To look more carefully at these questions one must peer through a cloud of statistical and econometric chaff.

But websites that try to separate the eco-wheat from the planet-despoiling chaff are puzzling in another sense.

To be useful, though, combinatorial chemistry must be combined with some way of sorting the molecular wheat from the chaff.

Surprisingly, though, one of them had a morsel of insight amid all the chaff.

Unfortunately, the really serious offenses were lost in the chaff.

Separating the wheat from the chaff is a difficult job for university administrators facing student unrest.

Lilienfeld's emphasis on evidence-based psychology has helped sort wheat from chaff in that field.

Voters across the nation are hard-pressed to separate wheat from chaff in the whirlwind of political ads.

Millet, sorghum, wheat-the chaff cracked beneath my tires.

They ate the sprouts of new flowers and the buds of apples and the tough leaves of oak trees and even last year's chaff.

There promises to be plenty of chaff to sort out from the valuable kernels of history remaining in the dump.

Your summary separates the wheat from the chaff and makes allowance for common usage.

My job is basically to sort the wheat from the chaff in the local business press and not bother busy readers with too much chaff.

The rough chaff left in the sieve was used to make grits.

The jaw exploded, shattering into chaff and showering fragments of bone and tooth over several square metres.

Primaries serve to support the wheat from the chaff.

COLLAPSE

Dictionary.com Unabridged

verb (used with object), verb (used without object)

to mock, tease, or jest in a good-natured way; banter: She chaffed him for working late. They joked and chaffed with each other.

noun

good-natured ridicule or teasing; raillery.

Origin:
1640–50; perhaps from chaff¹

Related forms

chaff·ing·ly, adverb

un·chaffed, adjective

un·chaff·ing, adjective

Link To Chaff

Collins

World English Dictionary

chaff¹ (tʃɑːf)

—n
1.	the mass of husks, etc, separated from the seeds during threshing
2.	finely cut straw and hay used to feed cattle
3.	something of little worth; rubbish (esp in the phrase separate the wheat from the chaff)
4.	the dry membranous bracts enclosing the flowers of certain composite plants
5.	thin strips of metallic foil released into the earth's atmosphere to confuse radar signals and prevent detection

[Old English ceaf; related to Old High German keva husk]

'chaffy¹

—*adj*

chaff² (tʃɑːf)

—n
1.	light-hearted teasing or joking; banter

—vb
2.	to tease good-naturedly; banter

[C19: probably slang variant of chafe, perhaps influenced by chaff¹]

'chaffer²

—n

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009
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Etymonline

Word Origin & History

chaff

O.E. ceaf, from P.Gmc. *kaf-, *kef-.

Easton

Bible Dictionary

Chaff definition

the refuse of winnowed corn. It was usually burned (Ex. 15:7; Isa. 5:24; Matt. 3:12). This word sometimes, however, means dried grass or hay (Isa. 5:24; 33:11). Chaff is used as a figure of abortive wickedness (Ps. 1:4; Matt. 3:12). False doctrines are also called chaff (Jer. 23:28), or more correctly rendered "chopped straw." The destruction of the wicked, and their powerlessness, are likened to the carrying away of chaff by the wind (Isa. 17:13; Hos. 13:3; Zeph. 2:2).

Easton's 1897 Bible Dictionary
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"Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed."

-Elbert Hubbard

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