Short form of Clifford or Clifton, meaning ford by a cliff or cliff settlement.
Cliff began as a diminutive of Clifford, an Old English place-name compound of "clif" (a steep rock face, riverbank, or cliff) and "ford" (a river crossing). As a place-name it described dozens of English villages perched near dramatic geography, and the aristocratic Clifford family carried it into the ranks of English surnames and eventually given names. The standalone form Cliff emerged in the twentieth century as Americans and Britons began cropping formal names into crisp, single-syllable handles.
The name's cultural associations are vivid and largely mid-century. In Britain, Cliff Richard became one of the most enduring pop stars of the twentieth century, giving the name a youthful, optimistic glow from the late 1950s onward. In American fiction, Cliff Clavin — the lovably pedantic postal worker of the television sitcom Cheers — gave it a comedic, everyman dimension.
The name also conjures Clifford the Big Red Dog, the beloved children's book character whose name was derived from the author's childhood friend, cementing Cliff's gentle, loyal associations for generations of young readers. As a standalone given name, Cliff carries the compressed energy of a geographical feature: blunt, elemental, impossible to ignore. It saw its American height in the 1940s and 1950s, when monosyllabic masculine names ruled. Today it feels bracingly retro — less common than it once was, which gives a child named Cliff a name that stands out precisely because it once blended in.