cleft
/ˈklɛft/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: 2.94 in modern English
10
Scrabble Score
5
Letters
1
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
verb
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."
verb
simple past and past participle of cleave
Example Sentences
- "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."
- "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."
- "a cleft of wood"
- "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."
- "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)."
Etymology
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.