in the buff
informal

In the buff
idiom

- naked; not wearing any clothes.

- in a state of nudity; with no clothes on

Merriam-Webster, Oxford English Dictionary

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WORD ORIGIN

The story starts with a buffalo. The French word buffle (wild ox) gave English the word buff in the 1570s, referring first to the thick, soft leather made from the hide of a buffalo or ox. This leather — a warm, yellowish-beige — was prized for making protective military coats. Seventeenth-century English soldiers wore buff coats as a layer of protection, and in buff originally meant simply: wearing one of these leather jackets.

The leap to nudity came from colour. Buff leather happens to be almost exactly the shade of pale human skin. By around 1600, writers had begun playing on this resemblance — if you were in your buff coat, you looked bare. And if you had no buff coat on at all, you were in the buff: nothing but skin. The earliest recorded use in the naked sense appears in Thomas Dekker's 1602 play "Satiro-mastix", making the phrase over 420 years old.

The word buff went on to lead several lives: a buff-wheel was used to polish metal (hence to buff up); the buff-coloured uniforms worn by New York volunteer firefighters in the 1820s gave rise to the American sense of buff as an enthusiast or fan (a film buff, a history buff); and buff as an adjective meaning physically fit emerged later still. But the oldest surviving everyday use remains in the buff — stripped down to what we were born with.

Helga & Paul Smith

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SYNONYMS

au naturel, bare/naked as the day you were born, bare-skinned, birthday suit (in one's ~), buck naked, clothing-optional, disrobed, exposed, in a state of nature, in one’s/the altogether, in one's birthday suit, in one’s natural state (the bare, the nuddy, the raw), IN THE BUFF, mother-naked, naked, naked as a jaybird (as nature intended), not a stitch on, nothing but skin, nude, nuddy (in the ~), peeled, sans everything, skyclad, stark naked, stark raving naked, starkers, stripped (bare, to the skin), to the buff, unclad, unclothed, uncovered, undraped, undressed, unencumbered by clothing, wearing nothing, without a stitch, wearing only a smile

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PRACTICE OWAD in an English conversation, discuss something like:

“British tourists are astonished to see people IN THE BUFF in Munich’s English Garden."

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SMUGGLE OWAD into a conversation today, say something like:

"The current dispute between the U.S. government and some AI companies could divide the AI industry into a PLURIVERSE of AI camps, including European AI labs, Chinese tech giants, open research communities."

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Paul
(OWAD Founder)