cleft

English

Pronunciation

  • IPA(key): /ˈklɛft/, [ˈkʰl̥ɛft]
    • Audio (Southern England):(file)
  • Rhymes: -ɛft
  • Hyphenation: cleft

Etymology 1

From Middle English clifte, 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.

The modern form with /ɛ/ is by association with Etymology 2 (the past form of cleave).[1]

Noun

cleft (plural clefts)

  1. An opening, fissure, or V-shaped indentation made by or as if by splitting.
    The river flows through a cleft in the mountains.
    • 1855, Robert Browning, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, section XXVI:
      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.
    • 1918, James George Frazer, Folk-Lore In The Old Testament, volume 1, page 42:
      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.
  2. A piece made by splitting.
    a cleft of wood
  3. A disease of horses; a crack on the band of the pastern.
Derived terms
Translations
See also

Verb

cleft (third-person singular simple present clefts, present participle clefting, simple past and past participle clefted)

  1. (linguistics) 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."
    • 1983, John Haiman, Pamela Munro, editors, Switch-reference and Universal Grammar: Proceedings of a Symposium on Switch Reference and Universal Grammar, Winnipeg, May 1981:
      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.
    • 2002, Claire Lefebvre, A Grammar of Fongbe, page 521:
      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).
    • 2013, Katharina Hartmann, Cleft Structures, page 270:
      The strategy the language employs is to cleft the clause containing the wh-phrase, as exemplified in (3) […]

Etymology 2

Verb

cleft

  1. simple past and past participle of cleave

Adjective

cleft (not comparable)

  1. split, divided, or partially divided into two.
    Synonym: cloven
Derived terms
Translations

References

  1. ^ Barnhart, Robert and Steinmetz, Sol, editors (1988), “cleft”, in The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology‎[1], Bronxville, N.Y.: The H. W. Wilson Co., →ISBN, →OCLC, page 178, column 1.

Romanian

Etymology

    Borrowed from Greek κλέφτης (kléftis).

    Noun

    cleft m (plural clefți)

    1. klepht

    Declension

    singular plural
    indefinite definite indefinite definite
    nominative-accusative cleft cleftul clefți clefții
    genitive-dative cleft cleftului clefți clefților
    vocative cleftule clefților
    This page is issued from Wiktionary. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.