A dialectal or archaic term for a cliff, bluff, or steep rock face, particularly in British regional speech.
From Middle English and Old English words related to cliff and clef. This is a regional variant that preserved older pronunciation patterns as standard English evolved.
Words like 'cluff' show that 'cliff' didn't always have a hard 'i' sound—regional dialects preserve ancient vowel pronunciations that linguists use to trace how English pronunciation changed over centuries.
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