rift

plural rifts

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.

   3 more examples

   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

   1863, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Enceladus”, in Birds of Passage

   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.

   1897, Bram Stoker, Dracula, Westminster [London]: Archibald Constable and Company, […], →OCLC

   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;[…].

   1918, John Muir, Steep Trails

2. figurativelyA 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.

   1 more example

   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”.

   2025 June 3, David Smith, “Elon Musk calls Trump’s ‘big, beautiful’ tax bill a ‘disgusting abomination’”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

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.

   1931, William Faulkner, Sanctuary, Vintage, published 1993, page 130

4. A shallow place in a stream; a ford.

present singular third person rifts · participle present rifting · participle past rifted · past rifted

1. intransitiveTo form a rift; to split open.
2. transitiveTo cleave; to rive; to split.

   to rift an oak

   3 more examples

   to the dread rattling thunder / Have I given fire and rifted Jove's stout oak / With his own bolt

   1610–1611 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tempest”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act V, (please specify the scene number in lowercase Roman numerals)]

   The Mother—her thou must have seen, / In spirit, ere she came / To dwell these rifted rocks between.

   1822, William Wordsworth, A Jewish Family (in a small valley opposite St. Goar, upon the Rhine), lines 9–11

   1894, Ivan Dexter, Talmud: A Strange Narrative of Central Australia, published in serial form in Port Adelaide News and Lefevre's Peninsula Advertiser (SA), Chapter III, http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks16/1600641.txt he stopped rigid as one petrified and gazed through the rifted logs of the raft into the water.

present singular third person rifts · participle present rifting · participle past rifted · past rifted

1. obsolete outside Scotland and northern UKTo belch.

1. obsoleteparticiplepastpast participle of rive

   The mightie trunck halfe rent, with ragged rift Doth roll adowne the rocks, and fall with fearefull drift.

   1 more example

   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.

   1986 December 21, Corinne Lightweaver, “AIDS Fears Shadow Lesbian's Memories”, in Gay Community News, volume 14, number 23, page 6