cleavage

CEFRB2

/ˈkliːvɪd͡ʒ/

noun

Türkçe translations

Translating…

In plain English

01
noun
A deep narrow space between two parts, especially a woman's breasts.
02
noun
The act or process of splitting into parts.

Examples

The blonde girl has a really nice cleavage.
He was staring at her cleavage.

At a glance

Sits at B2 on the CEFR scale

Senses: 5
Parts of speech: 1
Citations: 5
Synonyms: 1

Also pronounced

[ˈkʰlɪi̯vɪd͡ʒ]

Deep Dive

noun

Extra meanings

Any similar separation between two body parts, such as the buttocks or toes.
The hollow or separation between a woman's breasts, especially as revealed by a low neckline.
The act of cleaving or the state of being cleft.

More examples

In context

Holonym: décolletage
[…] the forces — the internal cleavages over class differences, the desire for "the good life," the white racist flight from the die schwartze — which shattered Jewish working-class community in the generation before mine.
Low-cut Restoration costumes worn by the Misses Lockwood and Roc (see cut) display too much "cleavage" (Johnston Office trade term for the shadowed depression dividing an actress' bosom into two distinct sections).

Quick test

Two questions on this entry. Nothing is scored.

Question 1 · Deep check

The Cold War's 'ideological blank between East and West' defined international relations, leading to proxy wars and arms races.

Practise this properly in the app, where the word comes back before you forget it.

Nearby

Citations

The word in print, with each source given in full.

[…] the forces — the internal cleavages over class differences, the desire for "the good life," the white racist flight from the die schwartze — which shattered Jewish working-class community in the generation before mine.
1985 August 24, Robert Butler, “Sex More Punished Than Murder”, in Gay Community News, volume 13, number 7, page 5
Mineral cleavage is a property of cohesion. The cleavage of the particles themselves and its attitude with reference to the plane of the greatest and mean dimensional axes help to determine the perfection of rock cleavage. The more nearly parallel to the greater dimensions of the particle, and the better the mineral cleavage, the better the rock cleavage produced.
1905, Charles Kenneth Leith, “The Observed Relation of Secondary Rock Cleavage to the Parallel Arrangement of Mineral Particles”, in Rock Cleavage (United States Geological Survey Bulletin; no. 239), Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, →OCLC, page 51
Low-cut Restoration costumes worn by the Misses Lockwood and Roc (see cut) display too much "cleavage" (Johnston Office trade term for the shadowed depression dividing an actress' bosom into two distinct sections).
1946 August 5, “Cinema: Cleavage and the Code”, in Time
Wendy thought that her therapist was looking down her cleavage and said so. The therapist was mortified and chiefly felt guilty, unsure whether she had been looking down her patient's cleavage or not. On a reflex she assured Wendy that she was not looking down her cleavage and the matter appeared to rest.
2003, Chess Denman, Sexuality: A Biopsychosocial Approach, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, →ISBN
All this time I kept my gaze fixed on hers, an enormously difficult task given the gravitational pull exerted by her cleavage. While I was critical of many things when it came to so-called Western civilization, cleavage was not one of them.
2015, Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer, New York, N.Y.: Grove Press, →ISBN

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Origin

noun

From cleave + -age.

Deep Dive

noun

More examples

Related

Quick test

The Cold War's 'ideological blank— between East and West' defined international relations, leading to proxy wars and arms races.

Nearby

Origin

noun

The Cold War's 'ideological blank between East and West' defined international relations, leading to proxy wars and arms races.