toffee
/ˈtɒfi
/- Generations of Scots have been weaned on the snack, which is actually a stack of wafers sandwiched together with toffee and coated in chocolate.
- My one true passion at the time was to devour anything with abnormally large amounts of sugar, chocolate or toffee.
- Refrigerate until the toffee is firm, about one hour.
- Following recent takeovers, it has now extended its range to include wine gums, fruit pastilles, jelly beans and traditional boiled sweets, toffees and fudge.
- She leads me into Chinese sweet shops where, alongside usual offerings of chocolates and toffees, there are buckets of candied dried shrimps and sugared squid.
- There's a lot of old toffee written and spoken about their almost torturous recording process, their suffering for their art and their shared obsession with getting everything aurally just so.
Phrases
not be able to do something for toffee
Origin
Early 19th century: alteration of taffy.
toff from mid 19th century:
This is perhaps an alteration of tuft, once a term for titled undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge, who wore a gold tassel on their caps—social climbers and toadies were called tuft-hunters from the mid 18th century. The associations of the word may have influenced toffee-nosed or ‘snobbish’, which was originally military slang. Toffee seems to have been a desirable commodity to soldiers during the First World War— not be able to do something for toffee, or be totally incompetent at it, is first recorded in 1914 in the mouth of a British ‘Tommy’. Toffee (early 19th century) is an alteration of taffy (early 19th century), now mainly used in North America for a sweet resembling toffee. The Taffy that is a name for a Welshman is quite different, representing a supposed Welsh pronunciation of the name David or Dafydd.