How to Use cleft in a Sentence

cleft

noun

• The river begins as a trickle of water from a cleft in the rock.
• He has a distinctive cleft in his chin.
• Williams pulled her top lip up over her teeth to demonstrate the look of a cleft.
  — Lisa Respers France, CNN, 16 Jan. 2020
• Perhaps then this cleft would open wide and swallow me, too.
  — Hugh Raffles, The New York Review of Books, 9 Oct. 2020
• His bed was overlaid with cardboard and tucked into a cleft of piers and brush.
  — James Hohmann, Washington Post, 5 Feb. 2018
• How can others learn more about Smile Train and help children with clefts?
  — Jillian Ruffo, PEOPLE.com, 6 Sep. 2017
• Our elders have spent decades placing their children in the cleft of the rock, in the hands of the Almighty, seeking his protection and guidance.
  — Stacy Dollar, ExpressNews.com, 3 May 2020
• Locals had eyed the spot for years before a group summoned up the courage in 2006, scrambled down a narrow cleft in the rocks, and paddled out.
  — New York Times, 12 Aug. 2019
• We are asked, forced really, to stare through a little boy’s torn pants into the bare cleft of his bottom.
  — Walker Mimms, New York Times, 12 Jan. 2023
• Some adults born with a cleft have had more than 20 operations on their mouth, nose and jaw throughout their life.
  — Alex Orlando, Discover Magazine, 15 Nov. 2021
• Hair tumbled down his back, his sagging pants exposed his ass-cleft.
  — John Horgan, Scientific American, 14 Feb. 2021
• From the front, approached from the circle, the cleft is a dark opening, a hole that, as Richards says, appears to be an entrance into the rock itself.
  — Hugh Raffles, The New York Review of Books, 9 Oct. 2020
• This afternoon, old men wilt in a cleft in the rocks, and a schoolgirl hauls a plastic bag heavy with one fat octopus.
  — Antonia Quirke, Condé Nast Traveler, 22 Aug. 2019
• Five trailheads provide starting points, including one that’s just a short stroll from the falls, a cleft hewed from steep cliffs.
  — Roger Naylor, The Arizona Republic, 28 Mar. 2023
• No such confusion surrounds the peach, with its telltale cleft.
  — Ligaya Mishan Melody Melamed, New York Times, 23 Nov. 2022
• The six-year-old has so far had seven operations, three to reconstruct his face and close the gaps that the cleft created.
  — Lizzie Parry, Fox News, 9 Mar. 2018
• Even by the standards of the time, though, when masculine icons from Batman to Clark Gable boasted clefts, Douglas was an extreme.
  — Jeva Lange, TheWeek, 6 Feb. 2020
• A few people had already made the descent and were disappearing into the cleft.
  — Daniel Mendelsohn, The New Yorker, 13 Apr. 2017
• In Cappadocia, a region in south-central Turkey, a river carved a deep cleft in the mountains and left behind a network of caves in the soft stone.
  — The Christian Science Monitor, 18 Mar. 2021
• Pilonidal cysts develop near the crease between the buttocks, known as the intergluteal cleft.
  — Scott Sundick, Verywell Health, 25 June 2023
• Where the trail crosses Summit Road, the route begins a continual climb on edge-hugging switchbacks that dodge in and out of stony clefts and tight bends.
  — Mare Czinar, azcentral, 13 Nov. 2019
• During his career, he's worked on cases ranging from gunshot wounds to the face, to children with deformed cleft palates.
  — Allie Gross, Detroit Free Press, 15 July 2017
• Straight into the cleft tucks an emerald fish, its head entirely enveloped.
  — Leah Ollman, latimes.com, 5 June 2018
• This was when the researchers swabbed the children’s gingival sulci (the clefts between teeth and gums, in which bacteria collect) to find out what was there.
  — The Economist, 21 Sep. 2017
• And there was Waipi‘o Valley: a deep cleft of wild green split with a river silver-brown and glassy, then a wide black sand beach slipping into the frothing Pacific.
  — New York Times, 31 Mar. 2020
• Tucked into cleft below Lee Mountain, the ears stand out as double sandstone pillars.
  — Mare Czinar, The Arizona Republic, 7 Apr. 2023
• Hutchinson playfully adds a watery horizon in a cleft between high ridges, making his world turn.
  — Cate McQuaid, BostonGlobe.com, 11 Apr. 2018
• Scientists know that smoking, diabetes and certain medicines used to treat epilepsy can boost a parent’s risk of having a baby with a cleft.
  — Alex Orlando, Discover Magazine, 15 Nov. 2021
• Out of the darkened cleft of the fjord, three outriggers soon emerge, propelled by local Korafe women in skirts of tapa bark cloth painted with ocher, their necks hung with flowers and shells, and faces tattooed in black.
  — Sophy Roberts, Condé Nast Traveler, 3 May 2018
• Jasmaine was born with a bilateral cleft lip, a birth defect that occurs when the lips or other parts of the mouth don't fuse together, leaving an opening.
  — Michelle Hunter, NOLA.com, 19 July 2017

Last Updated: 27 Jun 2024