Cleft Meaning
/ˈklɛft/Definition, CEFR level B2, pronunciation, examples, and quiz.
Listen pronunciation
Definition
nounAn opening, fissure, or V-shaped indentation made by or as if by splitting.
nounA piece made by splitting.
Sentence Examples
O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain.
Tom has a cleft lip.
CEFR Practice Quiz
The hiker carefully stepped over the narrow ____ in the rocky trail.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
The sheep was caught in a small ____ between two large rocks.
Word Origin & History
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.
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"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:
"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:
"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:
Explore More B2 Vocabulary Words
CEFR Practice Quiz
The hiker carefully stepped over the narrow ____ in the rocky trail.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
The sheep was caught in a small ____ between two large rocks.