cleft

/ˈklɛft/

cleft noun: an opening, fissure, or V-shaped indentation made by or as if by splitting. Also the simple past and past participle of cleave.

Noun

cleft (plural clefts)

An opening, fissure, or V-shaped indentation made by or as if by splitting.
- The river flows through a cleft in the mountains.
- 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.1855, Robert Browning, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, section XXVI
A piece made by splitting.
- a cleft of wood
A disease of horses; a crack on the band of the pastern.

Verb

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

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."
- 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.1983, John Haiman, Pamela Munro, editors, Switch-reference and Universal Grammar: Proceedings of a Symposium on Switch Reference and Universal Grammar, Winnipeg, May 1981
- 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).2002, Claire Lefebvre, A Grammar of Fongbe, page 521

Adjective

cleft (not comparable)

split, divided, or partially divided into two.

Synonyms:

cloven

Also used as

cleft is also the simple past and past participle of cleave.

cleft meaning in Hindi, Arabic and Persian

cleft in Hindi

opening made or as if made by splitting: विदर vidar, दरार darār, विभ्रंश vibhrañś, फटन phaṭan, फटाव phaṭāv
Split, divided, or partially divided into two: विदलित vidlit

cleft in Arabic

opening made or as if made by splitting: شَقّ šaqq, شَرْم šarm, صَدْع ṣadʕ

cleft in Persian

opening made or as if made by splitting: تراک tarāk

Examples of cleft in a sentence

First of all they released the arms from the bodies, then making four clefts at the end of each arm they fashioned hands and fingers.1918, James George Frazer, Folk-Lore In The Old Testament, volume 1, page 42:
The strategy the language employs is to cleft the clause containing the wh-phrase, as exemplified in (3) […]2013, Katharina Hartmann, Cleft Structures, page 270:

All 18 example sentences with cleft

Synonyms of cleft

cloven

Forms of cleft

Noun
plural	clefts
Verb
third-person singular present	clefts
present participle	clefting
past participle	clefted
past	clefted

Plural of cleft: clefts

Origin of cleft

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.

Words formed from cleft

Phrases with cleft

Words that rhyme with cleft

Questions about cleft

What does cleft mean?: Cleft means an opening, fissure, or V-shaped indentation made by or as if by splitting.
What is cleft in Hindi?: Cleft in Hindi is विदर (vidar), दरार (darār), विभ्रंश (vibhrañś). See Cleft meaning in Hindi.
How do you use cleft in a sentence?: First of all they released the arms from the bodies, then making four clefts at the end of each arm they fashioned hands and fingers.
What part of speech is cleft?: Cleft can be a noun, a verb or an adjective.
How do you pronounce cleft?: Cleft is pronounced /ˈklɛft/.
What is the plural of cleft?: The plural of cleft is clefts.

Words near cleft in the dictionary

Adapted from Wiktionary: cleft (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.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-cleft.wav.

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