How do the exegetes explain the seven ahruf in which the Quran was revealed?

In the supplied evidence, the only tafsir that addresses the question is al-Māwardī's al-Nukat wa-l-ʿUyūn. He states that the exegetes disagreed about the seven ahruf and held four views. The supplied page gives only two of them: that the ahruf are seven kinds of meaning (command, prohibition, promise, threat, disputation, narratives and parable), and that they are seven different lughāt (dialects or linguistic usages). The page breaks off in the middle of the second view, and the third and fourth views are not in the evidence.

The other explanations come from other kinds of work. In al-Ibāna, a qirāʾāt work, Makkī b. Abī Ṭālib holds that the readings recited today are part of the seven ahruf and agree with the script of ʿUthmān's codex. He also states that reciting against that script became, among all scholars, an innovation and an error. The unnamed editor of Makkī's al-Kashf says that Makkī's view of the ahruf departed from that of many imams, but Makkī's detailed argument is not supplied.

A popular modern English work, whose author is not recorded, reports in translation two further views. It says Abū Shāma (d. 665 AH) took the ahruf to be a concession allowing a word to be replaced by a synonym, a concession that ceased to apply after the ʿUthmānic recension. It also quotes Ibn Qutaybah (d. 276 AH) linking the ahruf to people's dialects. An editorial endnote in an English translation, from the classical-translation shelf with no author recorded, calls the dialect view one of the most well-known opinions.

The same note says the ahruf do not correspond exactly to the canonical readings. A doctoral thesis whose author is not recorded expressly declines to treat how the readings relate to the seven ahruf. None of these sources rules the others out, and this report does not choose between them.