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chaff

Archaic Terms
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

The husks and other lightweight debris separated from grain during threshing and winnowing; used metaphorically for anything worthless.

Detailed Definition
Chaff derives from Old English "ceaf" and names the dry outer husks, fragments of straw, and other light material separated from grain during processing. Its metaphorical use is ancient and pervasive: the Psalms distinguish the righteous (grain) from the wicked (chaff blown away by wind), establishing a binary that has structured moral discourse in English verse for a millennium. To separate the wheat from the chaff is to make the most fundamental judgment—between substance and superficiality, between the enduring and the ephemeral. Poets employ chaff to invoke this tradition of discernment, often in contexts of artistic criticism (the lasting work versus the forgotten fashionable), spiritual evaluation, or political judgment. The word's sound—light, breathy—seems to enact its meaning.
Example
Example in poetry:
The Psalms establish the fundamental poetic use of chaff: "the ungodly are not so, but are like the chaff which the wind driveth away" — separating worthless from worthy as definitively as winnowing separates husk from grain; Milton employs chaff imagery throughout "Paradise Lost" to distinguish true from false, the substance of divine truth from the lightweight deceptions of Satan, who scatters arguments as wind scatters chaff; A poet might write "his words were chaff, bright in the air a moment, catching the light, then gone — the wind had more substance than his promises"; Keats's "To Autumn" implies chaff through its winnowing imagery — the light husks blown away so that the grain's true weight can be known, the season as discriminating judge; In political poetry the chaff-and-grain distinction becomes a social metaphor: the laboring poor are the grain that sustains civilization, while the idle rich are the chaff that contributes nothing and is blown easily away; The visual image of chaff — light, golden, catching the light as it flies, briefly beautiful before dispersing — gives it a secondary poetic value as an image of ephemeral beauty, things that seem significant but cannot sustain their brightness.
Additional Notes
Chaff is one of the most important agricultural words in the English poetic tradition because its metaphorical use is so ancient, so pervasive, and so deeply embedded in both biblical and secular poetry that students encountering it in almost any context from the thirteenth century onward should consider its theological resonance. The Psalms' image of the wicked as chaff "which the wind driveth away" established the chaff-and-grain binary as the fundamental figure for divine judgment and moral discrimination. Students should trace this tradition from the Psalms through the New Testament (John the Baptist's description of Christ's winnowing fan) into medieval and Renaissance verse and forward to the present. The word's visual, tactile, and auditory properties — light, scratchy, rustling, catching the light as it flies — give it sensory as well as metaphorical value. Students should also note that "chaff" in its modern colloquial sense (good-natured teasing) is etymologically unrelated, deriving from a different Old English root. Related terms: winnow, thresh, granary, garner.
Other Meanings of “chaff”
Also Known As
husk hulls glume straw-dust
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