Liffe (said like the word life) was a London market where money people bought and sold futures: deals that say ‘I will buy or sell this later, at this price’. Learner dictionaries sometimes call this ‘shares’, but that is a bit loose. Ordinary shares are pieces of a company; Liffe was more about contracts on interest rates, currencies, and later options too. It opened in the early 1980s. In 2002 Euronext took it over; in 2007 that group joined the New York Stock Exchange to form NYSE Euronext. The old name still turns up in business news because traders kept using it. You will meet it in London finance talk, not in everyday chat.