cleft

Etymology 1

From Middle English clift, from Old English ġeclyft, from Proto-Germanic *(ga)kluftiz. Compare Dutch klucht (“coarse comedy”), Swedish klyft (“cave, den”), German Kluft. See cleave.

noun

1. An opening, fissure, or V-shaped indentation made by or as if by splitting.
   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
2. A piece made by splitting.
   a cleft of wood
3. A disease of horses; a crack on the band of the pastern.

verb

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."
   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

Etymology 2

verb

1. simple past and past participle of cleave

adj

1. split, divided, or partially divided into two.