cleavage
Pluralcleavages (some meanings)
- 1The hollow or gap between a woman's breasts, especially where a low neckline shows it.
The gown's plunging neckline revealed plenty of cleavage on the red carpet.
He kept his eyes politely on her face rather than on her cleavage.
Note
The word began as film censors' jargon: in 1946 Time still put it in quotation marks and explained it as a Johnston Office trade term, in a piece titled Cleavage and the Code. Today it is the everyday word, usually without a or an (a dress shows cleavage, too much cleavage) or with a possessive, as in looking down her cleavage.
- 2The division of voters into separate voting blocs.
Pollsters traced the party's defeat to a deepening cleavage between college-educated and working-class voters.
The referendum exposed a sharp regional cleavage that no party could bridge.
Similardivide, division, split, rift
Note
Political scientists use it for the fault lines that sort voters into camps, and it usually carries a modifier naming the line: a class cleavage, a religious cleavage, the urban-rural cleavage. Some divides are long-standing; others open when an issue such as war or a severe economic downturn suddenly matters.
- 3The act of splitting something apart, or the condition of having been split.
A clean cleavage of the trunk along its grain left two flat halves.
The quarrel over the will left a lasting cleavage between the two branches of the family.
Similarsplit, division, rift, schism
Note
The general sense that the technical ones narrow down, built from cleave and the -age of breakage and leakage. It is uncountable for the act and countable for a particular split, and it describes people as readily as things: internal cleavages within a community, a cleavage in a family. The voting-bloc meaning is the same image made technical.
- 4The tendency of a crystal to split along particular planes, or a similar tendency in rock, known as schistosity.
Calcite's cleavage in three directions lets it break into neat rhombs.
The geologists measured the angle of the cleavage in the folded slate.
Note
A crystal's order, not its flaws, produces it, so a perfect crystal splits more cleanly than an imperfect one. Mineralogists rate it by how cleanly and in how many directions a mineral splits: mica peels into sheets along one perfect plane, while quartz has almost none. It is distinct from fracture, the uneven breaking that follows no plane.
- 5The repeated division of a cell, especially a fertilized egg, into daughter cells after mitosis.
Cleavage of the zygote turns a single large cell into a cluster of smaller ones.
In leeches the first cleavage is unequal, producing one large and one small cell.
Similardivision, segmentation
Note
Embryologists count these divisions, the first cleavage, the second, the third, and describe each as equal or unequal, which helps decide what the resulting cells become. The divisions follow one another with almost no growth between them, so the cells get smaller each time while the embryo as a whole stays about the same size.
- 6A separation like the one between a woman's breasts, but between two other body parts, such as the buttocks or the toes.
His low-rise jeans had a habit of revealing cleavage at the back whenever he sat down.
The pumps are cut low over the toes to show a hint of toe cleavage.
Note
Here the word usually names its body part, since cleavage alone will be read as the neckline meaning: shoes cut low over the toes show toe cleavage, and Helen Fielding's Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination (2003) has a hyphenated bottom-cleavage wriggling out from under a bed.
- 7The splitting of a large molecule into two or more smaller ones.
Cleavage of the protein by the enzyme yields several short peptides.
Ozone treatment brings about cleavage of the alkene into two smaller carbonyl compounds.
Note
In the lab the word is often qualified by the bond that breaks or the agent that breaks it, as in bond cleavage, oxidative cleavage or enzymatic cleavage. It also works as a modifier, naming enzymes such as carotenoid cleavage oxygenases and the fragments they leave behind, cleavage products.
Practice
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Origin
Formed from cleave + -age.