Based on the discussion of “chuffing” in the 1980 Words thread, I decided to look up “chuffy”.  That’s a word I had come across years ago using an on-line anagram engine.  Looking it up today on m-w.com, they precede the definition with now dial of a person (it means short and stout).  I gather it’s from a dialect, but what dialect is ”now”? 

P.S. m-w.com only gave me one shot at “chuffy” today because it’s from their unabridged edition, and I have to pay or sign up for a 14-day trial to see it again.

I suspect now means “now”, i.e., at present, the implication being that its use in this sense was formerly widespread but now persists only in some dialect(s) of English.

Consistent with this, the OED describes it as ”Obs. exc. dial.”

Thanks Dr. T.  I see OED uses periods to indicate those groups of letters are all abbreviations.  M-W.com’s entry doesn’t use any periods.

I noticed M-W’s lack of period after “dial” only after Dr. T’s comment. The italics (I thought) could have been used for otherwise for greater clarity.

I must confess, I would have not easily understood what ”now dial of a person” was intended to mean, given the lack of context in the OP without Dr. T’s comment.

Apparently, access to that M-W’s definition has been removed, possibly due to activity generated by the OP. I was only able to see it in cache, and understood that the formatting may have been altered in the snippet I was able to locate, so I remained unsure.

M-W also had some problems (possibly exacerbated by the decision not to use periods on these abbreviations) last year, when somebody attempted to expand the abbreviation dial to dialect in these descriptions, and wound up defining “dial, v.” as
transitive verb
1: to measure with a dialect
2a : to manipulate a device (as a dialect) so as to operate, regulate, or select
intransitive verb
1: to manipulate a dialect

I pointed this out to them in July last year; it looks like they “fixed” the problem by just going back to the abbreviation.

Dr. T that’s funny!

Apparently, access to that M-W’s definition has been removed,

Actually, if you type “chuffy” into Google, and click on the m-w link it lets you see the entry.  If you go into m-w.com first and then type “chuffy” they don’t let you see it.