Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use cleft in a sentence

18 example sentences · noun, verb, adjective

Cleft means an opening, fissure, or V-shaped indentation made by or as if by splitting. Example: “The river flows through a cleft in the mountains.”

Examples of cleft by meaning

nounAn opening, fissure, or V-shaped indentation made by or as if by splitting.

  • The river flows through a cleft in the mountains.
  • 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

nounA piece made by splitting.

  • a cleft of wood

verbTo syntactically separate a prominent constituent from the rest of the clause that concerns it, such as threat in "The...

  • 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...
  • 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

More sentences with cleft

  • Her eyes kept gravitating toward the little cleft in his chin.2008, Sara Shepard, Flawless, page 206. From the entry butt chin
  • Similar analyses of cleft sentences have been repeated in the linguistic literature ever since.2007, Joachim Crass, Ronny Meyer, editors, Deictics, Copula and Focus in the Ethiopian Convergence Area, page 170. From the entry cleft sentence
  • He had a cleft chin, or as Matt whispered to me, a butt chin.2006, Carol Weston, Melanie in Manhattan, page 261. From the entry butt chin
  • Do you know what pain treads the unlifting darkness with cleft hooves, with webbed feet?1979, Poetry Australia, numbers 70-72, page 67. From the entry unlifting
  • Keratin plugs and other follicle debris may contribute to the inflammation of the hair in the midline internatal cleft pits.2008, Kirby I. Bland, Michael G. Sarr, Attila Csendes, Markus W. Büchler, Oliver James Garden, General Surgery: Principles and…. From the entry internatal
  • Even children with minor or correctable handicaps such as harelip, cleft palate, crossed eyes, or clubfoot were classed as "unadoptable".1973, Colette Taube Dywasuk, Adoption — Is It for You?. From the entry unadoptable
  • Such a solution only puts the humanist in a cleft stick by trading the problem of malnutrition for that of over-population.1964 September 3, H. Fullerton, Letters: Survival of the wild, New Scientist, Volume 23, No. 407, page 579. From the entry in a cleft stick
  • He, too, had a split beard of the same square cut, a cleft in his chin, and a squint.1938, Walter Claremartin, Golden Hour of Guchee. From the entry stop short
  • You have got me in a cleft stick.1901–1903, [George] Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman. […], Westminster [London]: Archibald Constable & Co., published 1903, →OCLC, Act I…. From the entry in a cleft stick
  • News, state of the language, tutorials, poetry, cleft place structures, and sumti-raising with other long debates on how to construct a sentence in Lojban.1993, M. Gunderloy, Factsheet Five - Issues 49-53, page 43. From the entry sumti
  • It is altogether probable that some of these broken loose bits of hair find a more or less permanent resting place in the internatal cleft.1957, International Medical Digest. From the entry internatal
  • At one point was an isolated pyramidal rock, crowned by a great tree, which appeared to be separated by a cleft from the main crag.1912, Arthur Conan Doyle, “‘It’s Just the very Biggest Thing in the World’”, in The Lost World […], London; New York, N.Y.: Hodder and…. From the entry pyramidal
  • Molar buccal cingulae are absent except for tiny remnants at the base of the buccal cleft and on the mesiobuccal surface of the protoconid of M 1 .1999 August 27, Steve Ward et al., “Equatorius: A New Hominoid Genus from the Middle Miocene of Kenya”, in Science, volume 285, number…. From the entry mesiobuccal

Meaning of cleft

  1. noun An opening, fissure, or V-shaped indentation made by or as if by splitting.
  2. noun A piece made by splitting.
  3. noun A disease of horses; a crack on the band of the pastern.

Full definition of cleft

Questions about cleft in a sentence

How do you use cleft in a sentence?
Cleft is used as a noun, verb and adjective. For example: “The river flows through a cleft in the mountains.”
What is a short sentence with cleft?
“a cleft of wood”
What does cleft mean?
Cleft means an opening, fissure, or V-shaped indentation made by or as if by splitting.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cleft (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this page: “How to use cleft in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/cleft. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.