riff

In music, a riff is an ostinato figure: a repeated chord progression, pattern, refrain or melodic figure, often played by the rhythm section instruments, that forms the basis or accompaniment of a musical composition (though they are most often found in rock music, Latin, funk and jazz). Classical music is also sometimes based on a simple riff, such as Ravel's Boléro. Riffs can be as simple as a saxophone honking over an entire chorus on a simple, catchy rhythmic figure, or as complex as the riff-based variations in the head arrangements played by the Count Basie Orchestra.
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The Resource Interchange File Format (RIFF) is a generic meta-format for storing data in tagged chunks. It was introduced in 1991 by Microsoft and IBM, and was presented by Microsoft as the default format for Windows 3.1 multimedia files. It is based on Electronic Arts's Interchange File Format, introduced in 1985, the only difference being that multi-byte integers are in little-endian format, native to the 80x86 processor series used in IBM PCs, rather than the big-endian format native to the 68k processor series used in Amiga and Apple Macintosh computers, where IFF files were heavily used.
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n. reef, riff, ridge of coral or rock located near the surface of the sea, shelf, spit, ledge of stone, sandbank, sand bar

n. riff, frequently repeated musical phrase (Music)

<file format> Microsoft's equivalent to the Amiga's IFF files format. RIFF is used for WAV and AVI files.
(1995-04-21)