Word.ws English Dictionary

cleaving

cleaving is the present participle and gerund of cleave.

Noun

cleaving (plural cleavings)

  1. The act of one who cleaves, splits, or severs.
    • In the luxurious wonder of so rare a dream, I took but little heed of time, and had but little understanding of its flight. But there were days and nights in it; and when the sun was high, and when the rays of lamps were crooked in the running water, I was still afloat, I thought: plashing the...1846, Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy, Bradbury & Evans, page 116
    • Many of Spenser's readers today find the cleavings and reunifications of Redcrosse and Una presenting a psychodrama of mental fragmentation […]2010, Greg Kucich, Keats, Shelley, and Romantic Spenserianism, page 273
  2. The act of one who cleaves, clings, or adheres.
    • On all of them they renew their cleavings to God with love and delight.1813, John Owen, The grace and duty of being spiritually minded

Meaning of cleave

Verb

cleave (third-person singular simple present cleaves, present participle cleaving, simple past cleft or clove or (UK) cleaved or (archaic) clave, past participle cleft or clove or (UK) cleaved or (archaic) clave or cloven)

  1. (transitive) To split or sever something with, or as if with, a sharp instrument.
    • The wings clove the foggy air.
    Synonyms:
    rive
  2. (transitive) To break a single crystal (such as a gemstone or semiconductor wafer) along one of its more symmetrical crystallographic planes (often by impact), forming facets on the resulting pieces.
  3. (transitive) To make or accomplish by or as if by cutting.
    • The truck clove a path through the ice.
  4. (transitive) (chemistry) To split (a complex molecule) into simpler molecules.
  5. (intransitive) To split.
    • And it came to passe as he had made an ende of speaking all these words, that the ground claue asunder that was vnder them:1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Numbers 16:31
  6. (intransitive) Of a crystal, to split along a natural plane of division.

See all 11 meanings of cleave

Adjective

cleaving (not comparable)

  1. That cleaves.
    • My head blazed with pain. The speed, the cleaving wind, the flailing beams of light from traffic tormented me. And there was the sickly smell too that no night air could clear.1999, Rhona Petrie, Dead Loss, Chivers, →ISBN, page 43
    • The fight was brutal and intense but soon it became painfully obvious that the fairy could not keep this pace up for much longer. She was beginning to tire. No longer able to attack with each turn and dive, she had to use all of her remaining speed and energy just to dodge pincers. She was on the...2010, Allen Williams, The Witches' Kitchen, Little Brown, →ISBN, pages 67-68

Forms of cleaving

pluralcleavings

Words formed from cleaving

Questions about cleaving

What does cleaving mean?
Cleaving means that cleaves.
What is cleaving the present participle and gerund of?
Cleaving is the present participle and gerund of cleave.
What part of speech is cleaving?
Cleaving can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near cleaving in the dictionary

  1. cleaverwort
  2. cleaverworts
  3. cleaves
  4. cleavest
  5. cleaveth
  6. cleaving
  7. cleavingly
  8. cleavings
  9. clebopride
  10. Clebsch-Gordan coefficient
  11. Clebsch-Gordan coefficients

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cleaving (page history and authors); cleave (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-cleaving.ogg.

Cite this entry: “cleaving.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cleaving. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.