cleft

Pluralclefts

1. 1
   notchnouncountable

   An opening, fissure, or V-shaped indentation formed by splitting, or looking as though it had been.

   The hikers squeezed through a narrow cleft in the cliff to reach the hidden valley.

   Ferns grew thick in the shady clefts between the boulders.

   Similarcrevice, fissure, crack, split, gap

   Note

   The noun is cleave plus a suffix like the -th of width: it runs back through Middle English clift to Old English ġeclyft, and German Kluft is a cousin. It takes in for what has been split: a cleft in the mountains, or, in Robert Browning's Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came (1855), a cleft in a palsied oak, “like a distorted mouth.”

2. 2
   adjective

   Split or divided into two, either completely or in part.

   Surgeons repaired the baby's cleft lip when she was a few months old.

   The leaves are deeply cleft, so each one looks almost like two separate blades.

   Similarcloven

3. 3
   split apartverb

   Past tense and past participle of cleave.

   The plow cleft the dark soil in long, straight rows.

   The great rock had been cleft by centuries of freezing water.

   Note

   One spelling serves the simple past and, after have or be, the participle: the plow cleft the soil, and the rock had been cleft by frost. The same spelling is also the adjective, as in a cleft chin. The linguists' verb for splitting a sentence is a separate word with regular forms of its own, clefted and clefting.

4. 4
   split-off piecenouncountable

   A piece produced by splitting something, such as a length of split wood.

   She fed a cleft of seasoned oak into the stove and closed the door.

   The old fence was built from clefts of chestnut rather than sawn boards.

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