The word "riffraff" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to refer to a disorderly or disreputable group of people. For example, "The bar was filled with drunken riffraff late at night."
The owners were keen to keep out the riffraff.
Mr Lee senior, still in the cabinet as "minister mentor", aged 82, is harsher, saying recently that Singapore needed "a world-class opposition, not this riffraff".
But now there were more and more riffraff enjoying the deep cool beneath the bridge.
When the Dutch-born writer Hendrik de Leeuw visited, in the nineteen-thirties, for his book "Cities of Sin," he included it as home to "all the riffraff of the world, the drunken shipmasters; the flotsam of the sea, the derelicts, and more shameless, beautiful, savage women than any port in the world.
Still, when the professors saw one another at the staff club or at church or at a faculty meeting, they were careful to moan about the riffraff from town coming onto their sacred campus to steal.
The setting suggested modern gags: one character, dreaming of a big new house, asks if the beach will be private or filled with day-tripping riffraff; another indicated that the Villa itself, just behind the stage, would make a suitable residence for him.
In town there was a professional summer theatre, a new thing at the time, which some people were enthusiastic about and others worried about, fearing that it would bring in riffraff.
He's right up there with the Michelin Man, Tony the Tiger, and the Energizer bunny — though it is unlikely that he would deign to socialize with such riffraff during his leisure hours.
TV executives are taking precautions against camera crashers, muggers, publicity seekers, and other riffraff.
He spoke in the style of a new sheriff of Dodge who had cleaned out the riffraff.
On arrival at the Henleys' airy, weathered wooden house nestled in the coastal woods, she made a point of admiring soapstone knickknacks, cooing over framed black-and-whites of Masai initiation ceremonies, and telling comical tales about the European riffraff she'd met in Nairobi.
