cleft.
An opening, fissure, or V-shaped indentation made by or as if by splitting.
Meaning & usage
An opening, fissure, or V-shaped indentation made by or as if by splitting.
The river flows through a cleft in the mountains.
A piece made by splitting.
a cleft of wood
A disease of horses; a crack on the band of the pastern.
Where this word comes from
From Middle English clift, from Old English ġeclyft, from Proto-West Germanic *klufti, from Proto-Germanic *kluftiz, equivalent to cleave + -t (“-th”). Compare Dutch klucht (“coarse comedy”), Swedish klyft (“cave, den”), German Kluft. See cleave.
To syntactically separate a prominent constituent from the rest of the clause that concerns it, such as threat in "The threat which I saw but which he didn't see, was his downfall."
Where this word comes from
From Middle English clift, from Old English ġeclyft, from Proto-West Germanic *klufti, from Proto-Germanic *kluftiz, equivalent to cleave + -t (“-th”). Compare Dutch klucht (“coarse comedy”), Swedish klyft (“cave, den”), German Kluft. See cleave.
split, divided, or partially divided into two.
simple past and past participle of cleave
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.