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OneKitly

cliff

nounnouncommon in dialogue

  • New Zealand//kləf//
  • New Zealand/[kʰl̥əf]/
  • //klɪf//
  • /[kʰl̥ɪf]/

A vertical (or nearly vertical) rock face.

noun

  1. 1

    A vertical (or nearly vertical) rock face.

    , scar

  2. 2

    figurativeA point beyond which something abruptly fails or decreases in value, performance, etc.

Etymology

From Middle English clyf, from Old English clif, from Proto-West Germanic *klib, from Proto-Germanic *klibą.

noun

  1. 1

    Variant of clefobsoleteObsolete form of clef.

    Suppose a Person hath learnt to sing in the Treble Cliff only, and would sing Notes prick'd in the Tenor Cliff on the middle tine with F# […]

Forms

plural
cliffs
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).