stiff
Definitions
General English
Medical
- adjective not able to be bent or moved easily
Slang
- verb to take financial advantage of (someone); to cheat, rob or extort from
- verb to flop, fail. A term used typically in the context of the entertainment business or sports.
- verb to aggress, treat harshly. The term is from ‘stiff-arm’, a version of ‘strong-arm’.
- verb to have sex with. A working-class vulgarism.
Origin & History of “stiff”
Stiff goes back to prehistoric Germanic *stīfaz ‘inflexible’, source also of German steif, Dutch stiff, Swedish styf, and Danish stiv. this in turn was descended from an Indo-European *stīpos, a derivative of the same base as produced Latin stīpāre ‘press, pack’ (source of English constipate and stevedore), Latvian stipt ‘stiffen’, and Lithuanian stiprùs ‘strong’.
