/ fæf; NAmE / verb , noun
( BrE , informal )
■ verb
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PHRASAL VERBS
- faff about / around
■ noun
[ U , sing. ] a lot of activity that is not well organized and that may cause problems or be annoying :
There was the usual faff of finding somewhere to park the car.
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WORD ORIGIN
late 18th cent. (originally dialect in the sense blow in puffs , describing the wind): imitative. The current sense may have been influenced by dialect faffle stammer, stutter , later flap in the wind , which came to mean fuss, dither at about the same time as faff (late 19th cent.).