Mildly annoyed and a little hurt, usually over something another person said or did.
Mildly annoyed and a little hurt, usually over something another person said or did; a low-grade, slightly petulant sense of having been slighted.
Colloquial and low in intensity, on a par with annoyance and irritation — but distinctively interpersonal and tinged with wounded feeling: you are miffed at someone, over a slight, where plain annoyance need not involve another person at all. It carries the “offense taken” flavor of pique and umbrage, yet is milder, more casual, and faintly comic — being “a bit miffed” is something one half-admits with a shrug, whereas umbrage is graver and pique stings the vanity more sharply. It names the feeling, not the behavior: where tampo or sulking describe the withdrawal that may follow, miffed is the small bruised displeasure itself. Far below indignation, resentment, or anger.
An adjective by 1824, “displeased, slightly offended,” from the verb miff “to take offense at” (1797), earlier “give slight offense to” (1811). These derive from the noun miff (1620s), “a fit of petulant ill humor,” a colloquial word of uncertain origin — probably imitative of a grunt or snort of disgust (compare German muffen “to sulk”).
The core sense has been stable since the early 1800s. Over time the participial adjective “miffed” became by far the most common form, while the noun (“in a miff”) and plain verb faded toward the archaic or dialectal. An early-19c. note attributed to Sir Walter Scott called it “a woman's phrase” — a gendered association that has not carried into present-day usage.
The ultimate origin is labeled uncertain by dictionaries; the “imitative of a sound of disgust” account is the leading proposal, not an established fact.