Cliffs

How to spell cliffs

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce cliffs

What does cliffs mean?

1. nounSteep, high faces of rock, especially at the edge of the sea or a deep valley.

Cliffs in a sentence

• The coastal path runs along the top of the white cliffs.

• Warning signs told walkers to stay back from the crumbling cliffs.

Where does cliffs come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the plural of 'cliff', which descends directly from the Old English word 'clif', meaning a steep, high rock face or precipice. It belongs to the native Germanic core of English and has close cousins in other Germanic tongues, such as Dutch 'klif' and the Old Norse 'klif', all carrying the same idea of a sheer drop of rock. The word has stayed remarkably stable over more than a thousand years, keeping its short vowel and its single, blunt syllable. The doubled 'ff' came about through the regular English habit of doubling a final consonant after a short vowel in a one-syllable word, the same pattern seen in 'staff' and 'cuff'. Because the base form is so simple, the only real spelling point in the plural is remembering to keep both letters of that doubled 'ff' before adding the 's'.

How the word is built

• cliff (a steep rock face, from Old English clif)
• -s (plural)