oaf [E17th] The word oaf goes back to Old Norse alfr ‘an *elf’. It originally meant ‘an elf’s child, a changeling’, and from this came to be used for ‘an idiot child’, and then ‘fool’ or ‘halfwit’. Finally, in the early 20th century, it acquired the general sense of ‘large clumsy man’, a sense used by Rudyard Kipling in The Islanders (1903) when he referred to cricketers and footballers as ‘flannelled fools at the wicket’ and ‘muddied oafs at the goals’.