stiff

Blunt slang for a corpse, and Monty Python's Dead Parrot sketch (1969) shows exactly where it sits. "It's a stiff!" arrives amid a pile of euphemisms (expired, gone to meet its maker, pushing up the daisies) as the bluntest of them all. The adjective carries the same coarse matter-of-factness in the informal "dead" sense, and neither belongs anywhere solemn.

The verb takes the person owed as its object, not the money: you stiff the taxi driver, the landlord, the suppliers. The past form is stiffed, and the passive is natural from the victim's side. William Foote Whyte's Industry and Society (1946) records a young woman explaining how it felt to be "stiffed." A hasty exit is typical, but the core of the meaning is the unpaid debt.

Here the payment is made but the tip falls short, and it need not be zero. In Mary Higgins Clark's I Heard That Song Before (2007), a man "stiffed the waiter with a cheap tip." That use of with is how the stingy amount enters the sentence. The object of the verb is the server, not the tip.

Slang that turns someone into a corpse in a single verb. Lou Reed's "Street Hassle" (1978) uses the get-passive to tell a man that his woman is dead, and that shape suits the sense: the killing is reported, not narrated. The verbs about unpaid bills share every one of its forms, so context has to carry the menace.

Wider than not paying: here someone is cheated, often in a way that only shows afterward. Stephen Birmingham's Shades of Fortune (1992) has a woman "stiffed by Adolph in his will," and John Crace in 2025 jokes that Trump "has been stiffed" on plywood. Passives like these suit the sense, since the cheated party is usually the one telling the story.

Bawdy English has had this use for centuries. Thomas Nashe's The Choise of Valentines, written in 1592/3 and published in 1899, already puts it to work. It is slang, and it is best kept out of anything formal or clinical. Hard is the equally informal synonym. Tumescent is the clinical one, and it is the safe choice when the register must stay neutral.

Chiefly North American slang, and mostly heard in a phrase: working stiff, the ordinary wage earner. Lucky stiff is the other set piece. In Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (1943), Keating's "Why, the lucky stiff!" expresses envy, not insult. On its own the noun can sound dismissive, so the fixed phrases are the safer way to use it.

Show-business slang for a release nobody buys. The usual frame is plain: the movie was a stiff, the record was a stiff. Ralph J. Gleason writes of a record that failed to sell 5000 copies coast-to-coast. The word measures sales, not quality, so a film can be admired and still be a stiff. The same failure becomes an action in the verb for flopping.

Here the thing itself fails, and the verb takes no object: a record or a play stiffs, whereas in the unpaid-bill verb somebody gets stiffed. Its home is the language of sales and charts. Wayne Jancik's The Billboard Book of One-Hit Wonders (1990) has a single that "stiffed in the stall." It works as the verb for what the "flop" noun names.

American slang for the customer who walks out on the whole bill, usually at a restaurant. It is easy to confuse with the non-tipper, an extension of the same word. That customer pays for the meal and shortchanges only the server. When the subject is the act rather than the person, English switches to the verb: he stiffed the diner.

The con artist's view of the victim, the same figure as a mark or a pigeon. It is slang from the world of swindles, and it treats the dupe as an object to be worked on. Context separates it from the ordinary working man: a stiff in a con is chosen because he can be fooled, not because he is unremarkable.

A flat adverb, with no -ly, and its natural verb is blow. "Blew very stiff" turns up in John Lowthorp's Philosophical Transactions of 1731 and in W. A. Crowther's diary of 1871, and Melville writes in 1849 that "it soon blew stiff." The adjective does the same work in a stiff breeze, from the "potent" sense.

Sailors mean stability here, not hardness. A stiff boat resists heeling and comes back upright readily, typically because its weight sits low or its hull is broad. The opposite is a tender or crank boat, which heels easily under sail. Strong, unbending timbers do not make a hull stiff in this sense, so keep it apart from the hard-to-bend meaning.

A golfer's compliment for an approach that leaves almost nothing to do. It works before a noun, as when William Price Fox in 1968 writes of "the stiff shots to the pin." It also comes after a verb as the result of the shot: knock it stiff, hit a wedge stiff. The word carries two ideas at once: the ball is close to the flag, and the putt is near-certain.

Wrestlers' talk for contact that stops being performance. Most strikes in professional wrestling are pulled. A stiff one lands with real force, whether by intent or by accident, and it hurts. The word attaches to the blow itself (a stiff chop, a stiff kick) and also to the performer: someone who works stiff earns a reputation for it, wanted or not.

Blackjack players use this for the awkward middle of the count. A hard hand has no ace that can still count as eleven, and it becomes a stiff once one more card could take it past 21, typically from twelve to sixteen. Such a hand is too high to draw on safely and often too low to win by standing, so it is where basic strategy has the most to say.

Underworld paper: checks, drafts and money orders, often forged, passed for cash before anyone notices. It works as a mass noun as well as a count noun, so a forger can move stiff the way a fence moves merchandise. This is criminal slang, not banking vocabulary, though its subject is money.

Prison slang for a smuggled message, close kin to a kite. An inmate writes it and it passes hand to hand out of sight of staff. What makes a note a stiff is how it travels, not what it says.

Numerical analysts speak of stiff equations and stiff systems, and the label describes behavior rather than appearance. An equation counts as stiff relative to the methods used to solve it. Certain step-by-step methods stay stable only when the step is extremely small, which is why such problems are usually handed to implicit solvers that can take larger steps safely.