TTFN

ttfn redirects here. For the book by Lauren Myracle, see ttfn.

TTFN is an initialism for a colloquial valediction, 'ta ta for now', based on 'ta ta', an informal 'goodbye', approximately equivalent to 'bye bye', 'see ya' or 'laters'. The expression came to prominence in the UK during the Second World War.

TTFN is still used occasionally in ham radio as an ending to a transmission but was brought into popular use in the UK in 1941 in the weekly radio comedy ITMA by the character Mrs Mopp. From 1939, initialisms, previously rarely used except by the military, were heard more frequently by the British public. ITMA satirized them by coining TTFN, a "pointless" initialism (no easier to say than the phrase on which it was based) and using it as a catchphrase.

'Ta ta for now' caught on with the British public, so much so that it was often uttered by dying people as their last words.

It was a catch phrase of Jimmy Young a BBC radio dj and entertainer from 1967 until he retired in 2001.

It was also a phrase used regularly in the later series of the BBC comedy Only Fools and Horses by Del Boy and at least once by Corporal Jones (the butcher) in Dad's Army. More recently it was spoken in Waterloo Road, a BBC drama based in a fictional school environment.

In episode 40 of Goodnight Sweetheart, Gary's wartime wife Phoebe Sparrow says to his present day wife Yvonne Sparrow "TTFN" when she returns to the 1940s from 1998.

In the United States in the 1970s, Paul Winchell, following the suggestion of his British third wife, Jean Freeman, improvised the redundant phrase "TTFN, ta ta for now!" as a signature phrase for the (originally British) character Tigger in the Disney films based on A. A. Milne's book The House at Pooh Corner. This, in a world now accustomed to them, popularised worldwide a word originally coined to make fun of initialisms.