cleft

• IPA^(key): /klɛft/
• Rhymes: -ɛft

From Middle English clift, from Old English ġeclyft, from Proto-Germanic *(ga)kluftiz. Compare Dutch klucht (“chaotic”), Swedish klyft (“cave, den”) cave, den, German Kluft. See cleave.

cleft (plural clefts)

1. An opening, fissure, or V-shaped indentation made by or as if by splitting.
   • 1855, Robert Browning, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”, XXVI:

     Then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him / Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim / Gaping at death, and dies while it recoils.

2. A piece made by splitting.

   a cleft of wood

3. A disease of horses; a crack on the band of the pastern.

• dimple

cleft (third-person singular simple present clefts, present participle clefting, simple past and past participle clefted)

1. (linguistics) 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."
   • 1983, John Haiman, Pamela Munro, editors, Switch-reference and Universal Grammar: Proceedings of a Symposium on Switch Reference and Universal Grammar, Winnipeg, May 1981:

     This may be so because in most languages the most natural clefting involves NP's, and it is in fact hard in most languages to cleft the verb, although some — notably Kwa languages in West-Africa — allow such clefting.

   • 2002, Claire Lefebvre, A Grammar of Fongbe, page 521:

     When the affected object is clefted, the clefted constituent may be assigned a contrastive reading on the event denoted by the clause, as is shown in (62).

   • 2013, Katharina Hartmann, Cleft Structures, page 270:

     The strategy the language employs is to cleft the clause containing the wh-phrase, as exemplified in (3) […]

• clefting
• cleft sentence

cleft

1. simple past tense and past participle of cleave

cleft (not comparable)

1. split, divided, or partially divided into two.

   Synonym: cloven