pffff.

n.  a dismissive huff, as in the novel Three Wishes by Liane Moriarty.

<My father gave her a dismissive look and sucked at his beer.  Through the foam on his lips, he said, “Pffff.”  —Eric Kraft, Inflating a Dog: The Story of Ella’s Lunch Launch.> <Guitars?  Pffff!  They’ll be giving them away in a couple of years.  —Mo Foster, Seventeen Watts?>

n.  a puff of air through one’s lips, as to communicate impatience in the novel Deadly Decisions by Kathy Reichs.


n.  a puff of the wind, as in the novel Riders in the Chariot by Patrick White.


n.  a sound of resignation.

<June made a pffff sound with her lips while August shook her head, and it washed over me for the first time in my life just how much importance the world had ascribed to skin pigment, how lately it seemed that skin pigment was the sun and everything else in the universe was the orbiting planets.  —Sue Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees.>

n.  a toneless wheeze from a pipe organ; see also pfff.

<One day he sat down at the organ and pressed one of the keys, but the pipe gave no sound.  He stopped playing and pushed away at the key.  The organ sounded pffff, in a long wheeze, but no more.  —Arturo Barea, The Forging of a Rebel.>

n.  an incorrect pronunciation of pH, as discussed in The Outer Reaches of Life by John R. Postgate.

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