rift

Etymology

Definitions

1. 1

   A chasm or fissure.

   • 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.
2. 2

   A lack of cohesion

   A lack of cohesion; a state of conflict, incompatibility, or emotional distance.

   • 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”.
3. 3

   A break in the clouds, fog, mist etc., which allows light through.

   • I have but one rift in the darkness, that is that I have injured no one save myself by my folly, and that the extent of that folly you will never learn.
4. ›+ 5 more definitionsshow fewer

   1. 4

      A shallow place in a stream

      A shallow place in a stream; a ford.

   2. 5

      To form a rift

      To form a rift; to split open.

   3. 6

      To cleave

      To cleave; to rive; to split.

      • to rift an oak
      • to the dread rattling thunder / Have I given fire and rifted Jove's stout oak / With his own bolt
      • The Mother—her thou must have seen, / In spirit, ere she came / To dwell these rifted rocks between.
   4. 7

      To belch.

   5. 8

      past participle of rive

      • The mightie trunck halfe rent, with ragged rift Doth roll adowne the rocks, and fall with fearefull drift.
      • Whether these men are alive or not, the fragile meeting ground I shared with them has been rift apart by a microscopic menace they didn't tell us about in high school biology.

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