Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. angry, sulky.

1825		J. Neal Brother Jonathan III 289: Well then, if you’re so stuffy about it.
1848		Bartlett Dict. Americanisms.
1862		J.R. Lowell Biglow Papers 2nd series (1880) 62: It’s justifyin’ Ham to spare a nigger when he’s stuffy.
1899		Kipling ‘An Unsavoury Interlude’ in Complete Stalky & Co. (1987) 79: I say, Beetle, you aren’t stuffy about anything, are you?
1907		Gem 16 Mar. 4: He was a bit stuffy, and groused more than a little.
1924		‘Sapper’ Third Round 540: When I sort of suggested [...] that he could do a lot with the boodle [...] he got quite stuffy.

2. (also stuffy-nosed) pompous, snobbish; thus as n., a snob (see cite 1951).

1914		T. Hampson diary 5 Aug. 🌐 He was a bit stuffy, didn’t see the need immediately to chuck up his job, but I did.
1929		J.B. Priestley Good Companions 222: Sitting in corners so long and listening to stuffy old people who said things that were either silly or downright frightening.
1936		D. Parker ‘Just a Little One’ in Parker (1943) 67: Elevator boys get awfully stuffy when you try to bring in a horse.
1949		‘F. Bonnamy’ Blood and Thirsty (1952) 100: Don’t be stuffy.
1951		T. Driberg Best of Both Worlds (diary) 19 Sept. (1953) 78: There is little of that absurd class snobbery [...] except for the bigger farmers, who are of course our aristocracy and one or two stuffies who fancy themselves as gentry.
1953		R. Chandler Long Good-Bye 201: In Pasadena, where the stuffy millionaires holed up after Beverly Hills was spoiled for them by the movie crowd, the city fathers screamed with rage.
1959		B. Kops Hamlet of Stepney Green Act III: Don’t start lecturing me again. We’ve been having a wonderful time. Don’t start getting stuffy now.
1963		H.S. Thompson letter 9 Sept. in Proud Highway (1997) 396: He’s a bit stuffy.
1972		T. Stoppard Jumpers Act I: Promise not to be stuffy.
1980		A. Burgess Earthly Powers 20: ‘Don’t be silly, Geoffrey. You forget certain facts of my biography [...] ’ ‘Ah, getting all stuffy now, are we?’.
1982		G.V. Higgins Patriot Game (1985) 98: Your sisters may be stuffy, but they’re nice.
1989		Irish. Indep. 7 Jan. 19/4: Hopefully it would speed up the long overdue death of the stuffy-nosed , upper-class, city image which has been associated with rugby.
1989		Harefield Gaz. 6 Dec. 25/1: We might seem a stuffy-nosed bunch [...] in the south-east.
1994		(con. 1930s) K.C. Kearns Dublin Tenement Life 186: And there was a woman, a hard ticket, a stuffy-nosed old thing – and we were such a poor gang – and she’d a young one going to private school.
1999		Indep. on Sun. Culture 27 June 12: Kitty is [...] cursed with a freakish father and a stuffy twin sister.
2000		Guardian Guide 13–19 May 89: With [...] Frederic March perfectly stuffy as the man who can’t resist her charms.