riffraff

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“
All of the petty publicists, search-engine marketers, blustery bloggers, and other riffraff are about to meet someone who is far better at self-promotion than they'll ever be.

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Definitions (7)

Toggle American Heritage definitions American Heritage Dictionary (2)

  1. noun People regarded as disreputable or worthless.
  2. noun Rubbish; trash.

Toggle Century definitions Century Dictionary (3)

Toggle GNU Webster definitions GNU Webster's 1913 (1)

Toggle WordNet definitions WordNet (1)

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Examples (50)

  • Apart from anything else, I never fancied her enough to sleep with her ... not after she started going with riffraff, anyway This time Mark did bite. —  Fox Evil
  • Or one of the riffraff, dragging my belongings north among the refugees streaming along the City Road? —  dummy 3
  • Like riffraff, which has fallen out of living relativity, on to the teeming absolute of the dust-heap, or the ant-heap. —  Lawrence - Kangaroo
  • As General Hamid Gul, the former head of Pakistan's intelligence agency, put it, 'These are not riffraff-these are the cream of society.' —  Bloggers.Pakistan
  • The Dark Knight set and Bale told him, "If you can get the script to a place where we can just read it on the stage and it would be compelling beyond all the noise and the riffraff, then we would have something to talk about." —  E! Online (US) - Top Stories
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Related

Roget's II Roget's II: The New Thesaurus

Allen's Allen's Synonyms and Antonyms

Used in the same context Used in the Same Context

draff ·  indigents ·  offal ·  dross ·  wastrel ·  proletariate ·  debauchee ·  bikers ·  troublemaker ·  feculence
Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition by the Editors of the American Heritage® Dictionary. Copyright © 2003, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Etymologies (2)

Toggle American Heritage etymologies American Heritage Dictionary (1)

  1. Middle English riffe raffe, from rif and raf, one and all, from Anglo-Norman rif et raf, rifle et rafle : Old French rifler, to rifle; see rifle2 + Old French raffler, to carry off (from raffle, act of seizing; see raffle1).

Toggle Century etymologies Century Dictionary (1)

  1. Early modern English rifferaffe; from Middle English rif and raf, every particle, things of small value, from Old French rif et raf (“il ne luy lairra rif ny raf, he will leave him neither rif nor raf”—Cotgrave), also rifle rafle (“on n'y a laisse ne rifle ne rafle, they have swept all away, they have left no manner of thing behind them”—Cotgrave), rif and raf being half-riming quasi-nouns reduced respectively from Old French rifler, rifle, ransack, spoil (see rifle, v.), and raffler (French rafler), rifle, ravage, snatch away: see raffle. Cf. Old Italian raffola, ruffola, “by riffraffe, by hooke or crooke, by pinching or scraping” (Florio).
 

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/ˈrɪfræf/
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