Visibly offended and indignant in a touchy, sulky, easily-affronted way..
Visibly offended and indignant in a touchy, sulky, easily-affronted way.
Huffy is the most outwardly performed of this set: it pairs being "roused to indignation" and "easily offended : touchy" with a touch of the "haughty, arrogant" (Merriam-Webster), so the feeling shows — in a sniff, a flounce, a wounded withdrawal, the classic image of leaving "in a huff." Where peeved and irked stay largely internal, huffy is indignation made visible and slightly comic, carrying a petulant, childish, self-important coloring closer to umbrage than to plain annoyance, but without umbrage's dignity. It is interpersonal almost by definition (you get huffy at someone who has slighted you) and often signals an overreaction the onlooker finds amusing rather than threatening. Register is colloquial and faintly mocking — to call someone huffy is rarely a compliment.
From huff (noun) + the adjective suffix -y, attested 1670s in the sense "puffed with pride or arrogance, ready to take offense." The noun huff (1590s) meant "a puff of wind," also "a swell of sudden anger or arrogance," from the verb huff; the phrase "leave in a huff" is recorded from 1778. Merriam-Webster dates "huffy" to 1677.
The earliest 1670s sense leaned on pride and arrogance ("puffed up"); over time the everyday meaning has settled on touchiness and visible, sulky indignation — Merriam-Webster still records the older "haughty, arrogant" sense alongside the now-dominant "easily offended, touchy."