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stuffy

adjectivenounattested in dialogue

  • //ˈstʌfi//

Poorly ventilated; partially plugged.

adjective

  1. 1

    Poorly ventilated; partially plugged.

    I can’t smell very well today – I have a stuffy nose.

    Let’s go outside – it’s getting stuffy in here.

  2. 2

    Uncomfortably warm without sufficient air circulation.

    Abby Jimenez Like my life was a stuffy room, and you’re the breeze that came in when the window opened.

    If Euston is not typically English, St. Pancras is. Its façade is a nightmare of improbable Gothic. It is fairly plastered with the aesthetic ideals of 1868, and the only beautiful thing about it is Barlow's roof. It is haunted by the stuffier kind of ghost. Yet there is something about the ordered whole of St. Pancras that would make demolition a terrible pity.

    We all sat in stuffy classrooms and had men in tweedy sportscoats ruin our afternoons.

  3. 3

    Stout; mettlesome; resolute.

  4. 4

    Angry and obstinate; sulky.

  5. 5

    Boring, old-fashioned, uninteresting, over-formal, pompous, very conventional.

    The stuffy professor droned on as the class lost interest.

    It could be argued that the rise of the socially conscious model reflects a very 2017 archetype: the “woke” young woman, who looks set to define femininity this decade in the same way that the lager-swilling ladette did in the 90s. It is also symptomatic of a broader cultural “awokening” that has reached the stuffiest institutions; even the royal family has recently relaxed its upper lip.

  6. 6

    Stout; sturdy.

Etymology

Etymology tree English stuff Proto-Indo-European *-kos Proto-Germanic *-gaz Proto-West Germanic *-g Old English -iġ Middle English -y English -y English stuffy From stuff + -y.

noun

  1. 1

    Synonym of stuffed toy.

Forms

plural
stuffies
comparative
stuffier
superlative
stuffiest
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).