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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

scuffle.

A rough, disorderly fight or struggle at close quarters.

7 characters2 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/ˈskʌfəl/Received-Pronunciation
  1. A rough, disorderly fight or struggle at close quarters.

  2. Poverty; struggle.

    slang
  3. A child's pinafore or bib.

    archaic
Where this word comes from

Possibly of North Germanic/Scandinavian origin; compare Swedish skuff (“a push”) and skuffa (“to push”), from the Proto-Germanic base *skuf- (skuƀ), from Proto-Indo-European *skewbʰ-, see also Lithuanian skùbti (“to hurry”), Polish skubać (“to pluck”), Albanian humb (“to lose”).

verb/ˈskʌfəl/Received-Pronunciation
  1. To fight or struggle confusedly at close quarters.

    intransitive
  2. To walk with a shuffling gait.

    intransitive
  3. To make a living with difficulty, getting by on a low income, to struggle financially.

    slang
Where this word comes from

Possibly of North Germanic/Scandinavian origin; compare Swedish skuff (“a push”) and skuffa (“to push”), from the Proto-Germanic base *skuf- (skuƀ), from Proto-Indo-European *skewbʰ-, see also Lithuanian skùbti (“to hurry”), Polish skubać (“to pluck”), Albanian humb (“to lose”).

noun/ˈskʌfəl/Received-Pronunciation
  1. A type of hoe, manipulated by both pushing and pulling, with a sharp blade parallel with the worked surface; an instance of this type.

Where this word comes from

The noun is a borrowing from Dutch schoffel; the English verb arose via subsequent verbification within English but is also parallel with Dutch schoffelen.

verb/ˈskʌfəl/Received-Pronunciation
  1. To work the soil surface for weeding, etc.

Where this word comes from

The noun is a borrowing from Dutch schoffel; the English verb arose via subsequent verbification within English but is also parallel with Dutch schoffelen.

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.