rift
/ɹɪft/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.64 in modern English
7
Scrabble Score
4
Letters
1
Syllables
4
Unique Chars
Meaning
verb
To belch.
Example Sentences
- "The Grand Canyon is a rift in the Earth's surface, but is smaller than some of the undersea ones."
- "Where ashes are heaped in drifts / Over vineyard and field and town, / Whenever he starts and lifts / His head through the blackened rifts / Of the crags that keep him down"
- "As far as the eye can reach is a sea of green tree tops, with occasionally a deep rift where there is a chasm. Here and there are silver threads where the rivers wind in deep gorges through the forests."
- "Far back in the dim geologic ages, when the sediments of the old seas were being gathered and outspread in smooth sheets like leaves of a book, and when these sediments became dry land, and were baked and crumbled into the sky as mountain ranges; when the lava-floods of the Fire Period were being lavishly poured forth from innumerable rifts and craters;[…]."
- "My marriage is in trouble: the fight created a rift between us and we can't reconnect."
- "Elon Musk, the billionaire tech entrepreneur, has opened a new rift with Donald Trump by denouncing the US president’s tax and spending bill as a “disgusting abomination”."
Etymology
From Middle English rift, of North Germanic origin; akin to Danish rift, Norwegian Bokmål rift (“breach”), Old Norse rífa (“to tear”). More at rive.
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: rift, rypta