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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
cleft
I.noun
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
cleft lip
cleft palate
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ a cleft in the granite cliff
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Above, the cleft was barred by vertical walls forming a difficult obstacle, demanding care and attention.
▪ An action potential in the presynaptic neuron releases neurotransmitter into the cleft.
▪ No-one lives up here in the cleft of the White Kielder Burn.
▪ Rain looked down into the steep cleft of another valley.
▪ Slice was perched along the sides of a cleft in the mountains that couldn't be dignified by the name of valley.
▪ The entire site looks across the valley to a further cleft in the mountains.
▪ This mountain may possess other features, but the double peak or notched cleft remains constant.
II.adjective
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ NOUN
palate
▪ Once here he will have an operation to repair a cleft palate by plastic surgeon Charles Viva.
▪ Katya was born with a bilateral hare lip and cleft palate.
stick
▪ The cleft stick plight which is his current political position is displayed most vividly over Mr Heseltine's coal mine dilemma.
▪ So the developing countries are caught in a cleft stick.
▪ Now the local authorities are caught in a cleft stick, hostages to their own political process.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ For various examples of cleft and pseudo-cleft structures, see sections 5.1.1.3 and 5.1.2.1 of this chapter.
▪ Once here he will have an operation to repair a cleft palate by plastic surgeon Charles Viva.
▪ The cleft stick plight which is his current political position is displayed most vividly over Mr Heseltine's coal mine dilemma.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Cleft

Cleft \Cleft\, n. [OE. clift; cf. Sw. klyft cave, den, Icel. kluft cleft, Dan. kl["o]ft, G. kluft. See Cleave to split and cf. 2d Clift, 1st Clough.]

  1. A space or opening made by splitting; a crack; a crevice; as, the cleft of a rock.
    --Is. ii. 21.

  2. A piece made by splitting; as, a cleft of wood.

  3. (Far.) A disease in horses; a crack on the band of the pastern.

    Branchial clefts. See under Branchial.

    Syn: Crack; crevice; fissure; chink; cranny.

Cleft

Cleft \Cleft\, a.

  1. Divided; split; partly divided or split.

  2. (Bot.) Incised nearly to the midrib; as, a cleft leaf.

Cleft

Cleft \Cleft\ (kl[e^]ft), imp. & p. p. from Cleave.

Cleft

Cleave \Cleave\ (kl[=e]v), v. t. [imp. Cleft (kl[e^]ft), Clave (kl[=a]v, Obs.), Clove (kl[=o]v, Obsolescent); p. p. Cleft, Cleaved (kl[=e]vd) or Cloven (kl[=o]"v'n); p. pr. & vb. n. Cleaving.] [OE. cleoven, cleven, AS. cle['o]fan; akin to OS. klioban, D. klooven, G. klieben, Icel. klj[=u]fa, Sw. klyfva, Dan. kl["o]ve and prob. to Gr. gly`fein to carve, L. glubere to peel. Cf. Cleft.]

  1. To part or divide by force; to split or rive; to cut.

    O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain.
    --Shak.

  2. To part or open naturally; to divide.

    Every beast that parteth the hoof, and cleaveth the cleft into two claws.
    --Deut. xiv. 6.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
cleft

1570s, alteration (by influence of cleft, new weak past participle of cleave (v.1)), of Middle English clift (early 14c.), from Old English geclyft (adj.) "split, cloven," from Proto-Germanic *kluftis (cognates: Old High German and German kluft, Danish kløft "cleft"), from PIE *gleubh- (see glyph). In Middle English anatomy, it meant "the parting of the thighs" (early 14c.).

cleft

late 14c., past participle adjective from cleave (v.1)). Cleft palate attested from 1828.

Wiktionary
cleft

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

WordNet
cleft

See cleave

cleave
  1. v. separate or cut with a tool, such as a sharp instrument; "cleave the bone" [syn: split, rive]

  2. make by cutting into; "The water is going to cleave a channel into the rock"

  3. come or be in close contact with; stick or hold together and resist separation; "The dress clings to her body"; "The label stuck to the box"; "The sushi rice grains cohere" [syn: cling, adhere, stick, cohere]

  4. [also: cloven, clove, cleft]

cleft
  1. adj. used of hooves [syn: cloven, bisulcate]

  2. having one or more incisions reaching nearly to the midrib [syn: dissected]

cleft
  1. n. a split or indentation in something (as the palate or chin)

  2. a long narrow opening [syn: crack, crevice, fissure, scissure]

Wikipedia
Cleft

A cleft is an opening, fissure, or V-shaped indentation.

Cleft may refer to:

Usage examples of "cleft".

Bull at once betook him to digging a grave for his brother, whilst Ralph with the captain and four others went and sought all about the place, and looked into all clefts of rocks, and found not the maiden, nor any token of her.

John Branner lay there, face down, his cleft head revealed in merciless clarity in the steady light.

Cloudless was the day, and the air clean and sweet, and every nook and cranny was clear to behold from where they stood: there were great jutting nesses with straight-walled burgs at their top-most, and pyramids and pinnacles that no hand of man had fashioned, and awful clefts like long streets in the city of the giants who wrought the world, and high above all the undying snow that looked as if the sky had come down on to the mountains and they were upholding it as a roof.

Hospital, the tract of modern deformity, cleft by a gulf of railway, which spreads between Clerkenwell Road and Charterhouse Street.

Suddenly Dolley dug her heels into the sides of her little horse and headed straight for the yawning cleft.

And more than ever before, the donjuanesque journey here points, by its repetitive crossings of borders, to the supreme cleft of time: the one between memory and forgetting and through this between irony and nostalgia.

We had crept through clefts whose walls had sent back the howlings of the Ephthalites, the White Huns who had sapped the strength of these same proud Sassanids until at last both fell before the Turks.

On the other hand, a cleft scrotum, an ill-developed penis, perhaps hypospadias or epispadias, rotundity of the mammae, and feminine contour have also provoked accounts of similar instances.

Kapila saw when he looked heavenward, and of what the Athenians accused Anaxagoras, or to know the secret name of Jahveh, or who cleft the Gordian knot, the meaning of 666.

She pulls it from the cleft between her ample breasts, glances back at him once again, smiling, and inserts it into the keyway in the door.

A narrow, ladderlike stair of handholds had been niched into the rock, and a few feet from the foot of this ascent a cleft, wide and tall enough for a man to enter, opened in the wall.

In a few moments Harding and Herbert on one side, the reporter and Neb on the other, had disappeared behind the rocks, and five minutes later Ayrton and Pencroft, having without difficulty crossed the channel, disembarked on the islet and concealed themselves in the clefts of its eastern shore.

As she knelt to pick up the darkest, oiliest rocks with which to cook her supper, pebbles fell from above her and a small blue dragon slid out of a cleft.

Sheer panties showed the full, pretty curves of the rear cheeks and the cleft between them.

An opaque pantihose seam ran crookedly down the cleft between her cheeks, and below, the narrow satin strip of the panties covered some of her best features.