Definition of "chaff" []

• Botany Thin dry bracts or scales, especially: (noun)
• Botany The dry bracts enclosing mature grains of wheat and some other cereal grasses, removed during threshing. (noun)
• Botany The scales or bracts borne on the receptacle among the small individual flowers of many plants in the composite family. (noun)
• Finely cut straw or hay used as fodder. (noun)
• Trivial or worthless matter: ignored the picky, unimportant criticisms that were just a lot of chaff. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "And the chaff is a great big huge gigantic pile all right!"
• "She would open the hankies every morning after her morning prayers and count out fifteen piles of eighteen cents, eighteen being the corresponding number to the Hebrew letters in the word chaff, meaning life."
• "But I do not know whether the habit of uttering ignoble ones in "chaff" does not at last bring the tone of mind down to the low level."