rif et raf

Riffraff comes from Old French rif et raf, meaning 'one and all, every last bit,' from rifler (to plunder, to strip) and raffler (to carry off, to snatch). The original phrase described total plunder — taking everything, leaving nothing. Rif et raf was comprehensive: it meant the whole lot, without exception. The phrase did not originally distinguish between the worthy and the worthless.

As the expression crossed into Middle English in the 14th century, its meaning began to shift. 'Riff and raff' came to mean 'every person, high and low,' then 'the common people,' and finally 'the lowest people.' The transformation followed a familiar linguistic pattern: a word meaning 'everyone' gradually sinks to mean 'the undesirable everyone.' Inclusion became exclusion.

By the 1500s, 'riffraff' had fused into a single compound word and settled into its modern meaning: the dregs of society, the rabble, people considered worthless or disreputable. The word carried class contempt — it was always used by those above to describe those below. Shakespeare's contemporaries used it freely; it appears in Elizabethan pamphlets describing London's underworld.

The word's journey from 'everything' to 'the worst of everything' mirrors a pattern found across languages: collective terms that degrade over time. 'Mob' (from mobile vulgus, 'the fickle crowd'), 'rabble,' and 'hoi polloi' all follow similar trajectories. When you name a crowd, you are already standing outside it.