What it means
To scoff something is to eat it fast, greedy and with absolutely no ceremony, basically shovelling it in before anyone else gets near it. You scoff your dinner, scoff a packet of crisps, scoff the leftovers from the fridge. It’s very British and usually said with a laugh when someone’s eaten like they were on a stopwatch.
Usage examples
"I only left the room for a minute and the kids had scoffed the entire packet of chocolate digestives."
"Don’t scoff your lunch so fast, you will get hiccups and miss the whole taste of it."
"He scoffed the whole tray of sausage rolls before the other guests had even taken their coats off."
"You scoffed that kebab so fast I’m not even sure you tasted it."
"She got in after work and scoffed half the trifle straight from the bowl."
Where it comes from
This one’s got proper British dinner-table roots. Scoff first showed up as a noun for food or rations in British slang, likely tied to Afrikaans skof and Dutch schoft, both linked to mealtimes or breaks. From there it slid nicely into the verb, so scoffing became stuffing the lot down at speed.
Other ways to say it
This expression also appears in
