sniffy
/ˈsnɪfi
/adjective (sniffier, sniffiest) informal
Scornful; contemptuous: some people are sniffy about tea bags...
- I know we terribly sophisticated Europeans tend to be very sniffy about America's obsession with 40-lane highways but (at least in my experience) you can get around the place.
- That pride continued for much of the 20th century, as developing nations studied the broad-based Scottish model to create their own curricula, and sniffy comparisons were made to schools in England.
- And what right do doctors have to be sniffy about the benefits of alternative therapies when their knowledge about the potential side-effects of the medication they are prescribing is so limited?
Synonyms
contemptuous, scornful, full of contempt, derisive, derisory, withering, mocking, scoffing, sneering, jeering, scathing, snide, disparaging, slighting, supercilious, disdainful, superior, dismissive
informal snotty, fancy-pants
archaic contumelious
Derivatives
sniffily
- The film was a big commercial success (the 1944 cinema audience being overwhelmingly female) and although the male critical establishment was sniffily dismissive at the time, it has had a healthy afterlife in feminist film studies.
- But prices were surprisingly robust, and despite the rough and ready surroundings - described sniffily by one person as ‘amateurish’ - both buyers and sellers were pleased with the day's proceedings.
- The German editors sniffily note that the Soviet authors thought that the Eagle's Nest, Hitler's mountain retreat at Obersalzberg, was a ‘castle’.
sniffiness
- In more than two years as an employee of a Scottish club he had never previously seemed so impassioned on behalf of his current home, or irked by the apparent sniffiness of some English attitudes towards its league championship.
- That and his commitment to producing high art, with its attendant disdain of popular culture and even a sniffiness in relation to liberal democracy, have proved something of a turn-off for the reading public.
- When I began reading his account, it's fair to say that I did so in an atmosphere of sniffiness.