Carey’s The Boy on the Bridge, an example with both rifle and riffle: To riffle (with a short i) is to flip through cursorily, and specifically, according to Merriam-Webster, “to leaf by sliding a thumb along the edge of the leaves.” You can make a fun noise and generate a small breeze by riffling the pages of a book.įrom M.R. "Five police officers, one armed with an assault rifle, ask him to remove its contents, and two female passengers dressed in leggings and flip-flops duly unload the bulging plastic bags inside and watch with increasing irritation as the police rifle through their contents." In this example from The Observer, the writer manages to use rifle as both a noun and a verb: Copyeditors are more likely to rifle through a reference work or an index, not to steal but to verify a fact or find an earlier use of a word or phrase in order to impose consistency on the text. A burglar might rifle through a victim’s chest of drawers in search of valuables, for example. To rifle (with a long i) means to search hastily and haphazardly, often with the intent to steal. Legislators don’t have enough time to read and absorb the entire thing, so they scan through it quickly, looking for specific phrases and keywords just to get the gist of what it’s all about.Īre these legislators rifling through the bill, or are they riffling through it? Both words can indicate quickly going through something, but the difference between them can be vast. A hypothetical 400-page bill is brought forward in Congress, and voting on the bill is expected to happen in only one hour.
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