Word Finder - stiff

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An average person, usually male, of no particular distinction, skill, or education, often a working stiff or lucky stiff.

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A Working Stiff's Manifesto: A Memoir of Thirty Jobs I Quit, Nine That Fired Me, and Three I Can't Remember was published in 2003.

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A person who is deceived, as a mark or pigeon in a swindle.

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She convinced the stiff to go to her hotel room, where her henchman was waiting to rob him.

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A cadaver; a dead person.

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A flop; a commercial failure.

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A person who leaves (especially a restaurant) without paying the bill.

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(by extension) A customer who does not leave a tip.

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Any hard hand where it is possible to exceed 21 by drawing an additional card.

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Negotiable instruments, possibly forged.

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To fail to pay that which one owes (implicitly or explicitly) to another, especially by departing hastily.

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Realizing he had forgotten his wallet, he stiffed the taxi driver when the cab stopped for a red light.

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To cheat someone

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To tip ungenerously

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(of an object) Rigid; hard to bend; inflexible.

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(of policies and rules and their application and enforcement) Inflexible; rigid.

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(of a person) Formal in behavior; unrelaxed.

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Harsh, severe.

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He was eventually caught, and given a stiff fine.

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(of muscles or parts of the body) Painful as a result of excessive or unaccustomed exercise.

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My legs are stiff after climbing that hill yesterday.

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Potent.

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a stiff drink; a stiff dose; a stiff breeze.

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Dead, deceased.

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(of a penis) Erect.

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(of whipping cream or egg whites) Beaten until so aerated that they stand up straight on their own.

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beat the egg whites until they are stiff

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Of an equation: for which certain numerical solving methods are numerically unstable, unless the step size is taken to be extremely small.

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Keeping upright.

Sunday morning she was stiff and tired.

He rose and stretched, stiff and weak but healed.

Damian twisted, surprised to find his body stiff with the simple movement.

She was too stiff for him to move.

Deidre grunted at how stiff her legs were.

It was bandaged and stiff, but no pain.

His body was stiff, as if he wasn't used to hugging her.

Romas ignored her and grabbed Kiera, pulled her away to face him, and gave her a stiff shake.

She braided her hair to keep the stiff sea breeze from tossing curls in her face and squinted upward again.

The boy blushed, appeared conflicted, and at last gave a stiff nod.

The atmosphere felt stiff and formal, as if this was not part of their routine.

The next morning, Sofia awoke stiff and cold on the bathroom floor.

The movement brought a painful awareness of how stiff her muscles were becoming.

It looked as stiff and formal as his hacienda did.

She stepped closer to Alex, her hands balled into fists at the end of stiff arms.

Generally speaking, soils containing from 30 to 50% of clay and 50 to 60% of sand with an adequate amount of vegetable residues prove the most useful for ordinary farm and garden crops; such blends are known as " loams," those in which clay predominates being termed clay loalns, and those in which the sand predominates sandy roams. " Stiff clays " contain over 50% of clay; " light sands " have less than to %.

Much of this region is covered with gamelote, a tall, worthless, grass with sharp stiff blades.

In some parts of Mexico and Central America this separation is still effected by running the sugar into conical moulds, and placing on the top a layer of moist clay or earth which has been kneaded in a mill into a stiff paste.

Some of the stiff boulder clays or " till " so prevalent over parts of the north of England appear to have been deposited from ice sheets during the glacial period.

Even in the soils which farmers speak of as stiff clays it is rarely present to the extent of more than I or 2%.

In certain sandy soils and in a few stiff clays it may amount to less than 4%, while in others in limestone and chalk districts there may be 50 to 80% present.

The addition of small quantities of lime, especially in a caustic form, to stiff greasy clays makes them much more porous and pliable.

It is this power of creating a more crumbly tilth on stiff clays that makes lime so valuable to the farmer.

Generally speaking light poor lands deficient in organic matter will need the less caustic form or chalk, while quicklime will be most satisfactory on the stiff clays and richer soils.

On the stiff soils overl y ing the chalk it was formerly the custom to dig pits through the soil to the rock below.

Even stiff soils deficient in lime are greatly improved in fertility by the addition of marls.

The ratio of cases to population living in Dublin on loose porous gravel soil for the ten years1881-1891was I in 94, while that of those living on stiff clay soil was but 1 in 145.

The tree succeeds in deep, sandy or calcareous loams, and in stiff loams resting on a gravelly bottom.

Oxycedrus, a common plant in the Mediterranean region, forming a shrub or low tree with spreading branches and short, stiff, prickly leaves.

The tail may be a simple hollow muscular process or provided with stiff bristles set in transverse rows, or divided into two equally long processes, or finally it may form a large vesicular structure.

Thus a graceful and realistic school has replaced the comparatively stiff and conventional style of former times.

The bottom of the Black Sea is covered by a stiff blue mud in which Sir John Murray found much sulphide of iron,' grains or needles of pyrites making up nearly 50% of the deposit, and there are also grains of amorphous calcium carbonate evidently precipitated from the water.

Red clay is the deposit peculiar to the abysmal area; 70 carefully investigated samples collected by the " Challenger " came from an average depth of 2730 fathoms, 97 specimens collected by the " Tuscarora " came from an average depth of 2860 fathoms, and 26 samples obtained by the " Albatross " in the Central Pacific came from an average depth of 2620 fathoms. Red clay has not yet been found in depths less than 2200 fathoms. The main ingredient of the deposit is a stiff clay which is plastic when fresh, but dries to a stony hardness.

It is essential that they shall be strong and stiff, so as not to yield at all from the pressure of the wet concrete.

Stiff fighting took place beneath Soglio di Campiglia and Pria Fora, and the Italians withdrew to the mountain line which had been hastily prepared from Forni Alti by Monte Spin to Pria Fora.

Though commonly dignified and a little stiff he seems to have had a strong sense of humour and he was fond of telling a good story.

The head is covered with a turban, or a cap of a fashion peculiar to the Parsees; it is made of stiff material, something like the European hat, without any rim, and has an angle from the top of the forehead backwards.

Every afternoon, especially from October to May, a stiff breeze sweeps the city; every afternoon in the summer the fogs roll over it from the ocean.

So closely allied are these two fishes that their distinctness can be proved only by an examination of the gill-apparatus, the allis shad having from sixty to eighty very fine and long gill-rakers along the concave edge of the first branchial arch, whilst the twaite shad possesses from twenty-one to twenty-seven stout and stiff gill-rakers only.

The fur is of some commercial value, although rather stiff and harsh; its colour being reddishbrown.

If, however, the bird is fairly launched in space and a stiff breeze is blowing, all that is required in many instances is to extend the wings at a slight upward angle to the horizon so that the under parts of the wings present kite-like surfaces.

A trench was dug in the soft upper mud until the stratum of stiff blue clay was reached.

Wesley was a stiff High Churchman, who scrupulously followed every detail of the rubrics.

An Orthodox bishop, vested for the holy liturgy, wears over his cassock - (i) the rnxcipcov, or alb (q.v.); the E7nrpay,Acov, or stole (q.v.); (3) the a narrow stuff girdle clasped behind, which holds together the two vestments above named; (4) the E7 n, uaviexa, liturgical cuffs, corresponding, possibly, to the pontifical gloves of the West;' (5) the i 7rtyovarcov, a stiff lozengeshaped piece of stuff hanging at the right side by a piece of riband from the girdle or attached to the o-AKKos, the equivalent of the Western maniple (q.v.); (6) the like the Western dalmatic (q.v.), worn instead of the 4acv6Acov, or chasuble; (7) the c?µocp6pcov, the equivalent of the Western pallium (q.v.).

In the East there is no sequence of liturgical colours, nor, indeed, any definite sense of liturgical colour at all; the vestments are usually white or red, and stiff with gold embroidery.

The Crustacea are - with the exception of the Cirrhipedia - remarkable for having stiff, motionless spermatozoids.

A small group of Australian genera closely approach the order Juncaceae in having small crowded flowers with a scarious or membranous perianth; they include Xanthorrhoea (grass-tree or blackboy) and Kingia, arborescent plants with an erect woody stem crowned with a tuft of long stiff narrow leaves, from the centre of which rises a tall dense flower spike or a number of stalked flower-heads; this group has been included in Juncaceae, from which it is doubtfully distinguished only by the absence of the long twisted stigmas which characterize the true rushes.

Within the Upper Greensand an equally narrow ring of Gault is exposed, its stiff clay forming level plains of grazing pasture, without villages, and with few farmhouses even; and from beneath it the successivOeds of the Lower Greensand rise towards the centre, forming a wider belt, and reaching a considerable height before breaking off in a fine escarpment, the crest of which is in several points higher than the outer ring of Chalk.

Everything visible was made of wood, and the scene seemed stiff and extremely unnatural.

In the years when she was growing out of childhood, her style lost its early simplicity and became stiff and, as she says, "periwigged."