Plural of alif; multiple instances of the first letter of the Arabic alphabet in written text.
From Arabic 'ālif' (the first letter) + English plural '-s'. This is a straightforward pluralization of the Arabic letter name when discussing multiple instances in English writing.
When you pluralize letters, you're creating a weird grammatical space—'three alifs' sounds strange because we don't usually count individual letters, but it matters in typography, calligraphy, and language analysis.
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