Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. a fool, albeit an amiable one [like the SE muff, the fool is soft adj. (1) in the head, and note muff n.¹ (1) and the use of cunt n. (1) and other terms for the vagina as synons. for a fool].

1654		Memoirs & Travels of Sir John Reresby (1813) 157: The Low Dutch call the High muffes, that is etourdis as the French have it, or blockheads.
1819		P. Egan Key to the Picture of the Fancy going to a Fight 19: The drag proprietor [...] says, ‘as he should be a muff indeed to do that’ [i.e. return tarvellers’ dares].
1823		Devizes & Wilts. Gaz. 29 May 2/4: He called for a daffy and drank ‘Confusion to the muff.’ We presume he mean the losing man.
1830		Egan Finish to the Adventures of Tom and Jerry (1889) 130: Teased into a conversation with some of the greatest Muffs in life.
1845		R.S. Surtees Hillingdon Hall I 261: We’re come to enlighten these muffs, and a pretty benighted, bewildered, bedevilled lot they are.
1846		Swell’s Night Guide 126/1: Muff, a raw or silly fellow.
1847		[A. Harris] (con. 1820s) Settlers & Convicts 321: The man that was driving the Bathurst herd was a regular muff (booby), and never dropped down what o'clock it was (did not detect the scheme).
1851		Manchester Spy (NH) 13 Sept. n.p.: What is a Muff? — A great big thing that holds a lady’s hand without squeezing it.
1853		Bell’s Life in Sydney 15 Oct. 3/1: Woa be Benny! doan’t ye know? lor what a muff you be!
1854		Delhi Sketch Bk 1 Aug. 90/2: ‘What a confounded muff our Colonel is’.
1858		F.W. Farrar Eric II 222: You’re a couple of confounded muffs!
1860		Potter Jrnl (Coudersport, PA) 25 Oct. 1/4: [set in London] What a couple of muffs we are! Why don’t you turf the thing?
1860		Inquirer (Perth, WA) 28 Nov. 3/6: Bother that romance and stuff! / She who likes it is a muff.
1868		H.L. Williams Black-Eyed Beauty 13: He’s that muff that wanted to wear one of our hats in the last Triennial Turnout!
1869		Sporting Gaz. (London) 6 Nov. 15/2: [A]t football it is useless to thing of ‘funking’ [...] and he who does so is not only laughed and jeered at by his companions, but is put down as a ‘muff’.
1874		‘Old Calabar’ Won in a Canter I 20: ‘[W]hat a muff you were not to snap at Rasper’s offer of four miles acrosS country; he cannot ride a yard, you would have licked him into fits’.
1875		‘Aliph Cheem’ Lays of Ind (1905) 51: ‘Oh, pray let him stop,’ roared the Gov’nor, ‘the muff’.
1880		G.R. Sims ‘Fallen by the Way’ Ballads of Babylon 11: Mind, when you’re choosin’ a mate, Jim, don’t have a rogue or a muff.
1880		Bulletin (Sydney) 22 May 5/4: Brisbane girls [...] have taken to their jackets and muffs, signs of approaching winter. A good many take to muffs all the year round.
1882		Nat. Police Gaz. (NY) 11 Nov. 3/2: [T]hey turned out to be [...] mediocre drudges and [...] the veriest ‘muffs’.
1894		S. Crane in N.Y. Press 9 Dec. in Stallman (1966) 115: I ain’t no muff. [Ibid.] 116: He took me for a muff. He tought he was goin’ t’ bluff me out.
1894		Truth (Sydney) 11 Feb. 1/3: For cricketing toughs / To wipe out our muffs / With Shrewsbury, Grace and with Gunn.
1897		Boy’s Own Paper 13 Nov. 104: Heywood was a muff, and Munro a drivelling old idiot.
1900		P. White West End 130: What d’you think, Rupert? Miranda’s ‘chucked’ Elsenham. [...] Elsenham’s a muff, and I’m not surprised.
1902		E. Fisher ‘Billiard-Marker’s Yarn’ in Bulletin Reciter 1880–1901 1: We kept on kiddin’ that old Chorley was a muff.
1914		Omaha Dly Bee 17 Oct. 15/1: One o’ d’ muffs gets beered up and pulls a squawk [and] we gets pinched.
1919		Marvel 1 Mar. 7: Get rid of the muff.
1948		J. Maclaren-Ross ‘A Poet of Fear’ in Bitten by the Tarantula (2005) 295: The author cannot resist a typical English temptation to make himself out, modestly, a bit of a muff.

2. (orig. sporting) an incompetent, one who is awkward [muff v.¹ ; despite Vaux’s use in 1812 OED claims that this sense ‘has not been found earlier than the second quarter of the 19th C. (being unrecorded even in the slang dictionaries)’; note, however, Nares, Glossary (1822), who cites Warner Albion’s England c.1600: ‘Those stiles to him weare strange, but thay / Did feofe them on the bace-borne muffe, and him as king obay’, which suggests that sense 2 could come from sense 1, although it is generally perceived to be the other way around].

1812		Vaux Vocab. of the Flash Lang.
1823		‘Jon Bee’ Dict. of the Turf, the Ring, the Chase, etc. 210: He who fails in an endeavour, is said to ‘make a moph of it’ and if he is commonly guilty of failure, he is himself ‘a proper moph’.
1837		Thackeray Yellowplush Papers in Works (1898) III 241: Only her poor father was kind to her; and he, poor old muff! his kindness was of no use.
1846		Bell’s Life in Sydney 3 Jan. 1/6: Several other matches wero run during tho evening, but as miine host of the Vic said they were only ‘muffs,’ I did not stay.
1846		Censor (London) 25 Jan. 5/2: ‘Here you will see the muff and swell what made it a crime to ring a muffin bell’.
1847		Blackwood’s Mag. LX 147: Many affected to sneer at him, as a ‘muff,’ who would have been exceedingly flattered by his personal acquaintance.
1854		‘Cuthbert Bede’ Adventures of Mr Verdant Green (1982) II 143: Explain the common denominators ‘brick’, ‘trump’, ‘spoon’, ‘muff’, and state what was the greatest common denominator in the last term.
1861		Hills & Plains I 282: ‘[H]e won't do anything. I had no notion he was such a tremendous muff’.
1862		Golden Age (Queenbeyan, NSW) 14 Aug. 3/3: [I]s’nt the way he tells ‘Butter-fingers’ he’s a muff for missing that catch, as good as a blessing to listen to!
1866		Mansfield School-Life at Winchester College (1870) 136: I was a tolerably good hand at the former [football], and rather a muff at the latter [cricket].
1879		G.R. Sims Dagonet Ballads 101: I can hunt down a burglar and nab him, and tackle the roughest o’ rough, / But when it’s a female I’m after I feels like a regular muff.
1883		T.B. Reed Willoughby Captains (1887) 25: Felton was a muff at rowing, but he was made captain of the boats all the same while he was cock of the school.
1885		Bulletin (Sydney) 17 Jan. 6/3: It was one John Radcliff, who tootles at the flute a bit, and who was foolish enough to play cricket with some Americans, who, as everybody knows, are the biggest muffs at cricket that ever held a bat.
1899		Boy’s Own Paper 8 Apr. 438: Bah! You soft-headed young muff!
1900		Punch 31 Jan. 81/1: berries for all tastes [...] For muffs – Mulberries.
1905		N. Gale ‘The Olympians’ in More Cricket Songs 31: The question ran, Was Arthur Mold / Unfairly stigmatised by muffs, / Or did he play a dubious prank?
1910		O. Johnson Varmint 87: You’re a muff, a lowdown muff, in every sense of the word!
1922		Joyce Ulysses 506: Well for you, you muff, if you had that weapon with knobs and lumps and warts all over it.

3. a blunder, an error; esp. in phr. make a muff of oneself, to act in an incompetent, foolish manner.

1823		‘Jon Bee’ Dict. of the Turf, the Ring, the Chase, etc. 210: He who fails in an endeavour, is said to ‘make a moph of it’.
1853		Exeter & Plymouth Gaz. (Devon) 19 Feb. 6/2: He made a regular muff of it.
1883		Cincinnati Enquirer 9 May 2/1: Maccius, their second man at the bat in this inning, was given first on Maculiar’s muff of his fly.
1887		World (N.Y.) 27 Aug. 6/1: A moment later Williamson hit to right field, and although it was the kind of a high fly that Mike usually ‘eats,’ he kept up the order of things by making a muff of it.
1897		Marshall Pomes 114: I was to doctor the stuff, And be somewhere on hand with a pistol if the hocussing turned out a muff [F&H].
1913		S.F. Bulletin 17 Mar. 16/4: Then, too, there were the muffs that helped to pile up a lop-sided score for the visitors.
1943		T. Thursday ‘Home Runyon’ in Sports Winners Feb. 🌐 That was the most perfect muff I ever seen.
1994		M. Ribowsky Don’t Look Back 143: Barely paying attention, he gave up a run in the eighth, which scored on his fielding muff.

4. a police officer.

2001

N. Barlay Hooky Gear 25: POLICE POLICE POLICE. Like I need tellin. [...] The first muffs mount the stairs.