Plural of calif; multiple Islamic religious and political leaders or the rulers of different Islamic states.
English plural of calif (variant of caliph), formed with the standard -s ending. This spelling preserves the early modern English adaptation of the Arabic khalifah.
The different spellings—calif, caliph, khalif, khalifah—form a linguistic trail showing how English ears struggled to reproduce Arabic sounds, and different eras of contact produced different spelling conventions.
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