It's Merriam Webster's Word of the Day for July 20th.

Today's word is Raffish, spelled R-A-F-F-F-I-S-H.

Raffish is an adjective.

It describes people and things that show a careless but usually

attractive unconventionality. Here's the word used in a sentence from Harper's magazine.

Three or four decades ago, the newspaper man was appealingly Raffish, at once a bum who drank

too much, and a knight-errant, who charged unafraid at social injustice, suckered the weak,

and crossed lances with the powerful and arrogant.

Raffish combines the English noun raff with the suffix-ish,

which in this case means characteristic of.

When we use the word raffish, we literally means resembling raff. But what exactly is raff? You might be more familiar with Raff's synonym,

riff-raff, which refers to disreputable people of low social status. Despite the resemblance, these two nouns are distinct in origin.

Raff comes directly from the Middle English RAF, meaning rubbish, while Riff-Raff descends from the Anglo-French,

rife a raf, meaning altogether. The similarities between Raff and riffraff prompted people to start using

the two words as synonyms, and raff gained a rabble sense. It was that rag-tag raff that

gave rise to the adjective raffish in the late 1700s. With your word of the day, I'm Peter

Sokolowski.

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