Rift

//ɹɪft// noun, verb

noun, verb ·Common ·High school level

Definitions

Noun
  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."

  2. 2
    a personal or social separation (as between opposing factions) wordnet
  3. 3
    A lack of cohesion; a state of conflict, incompatibility, or emotional distance. figuratively

    "My marriage is in trouble: the fight created a rift between us and we can't reconnect."

  4. 4
    a narrow fissure in rock wordnet
  5. 5
    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."

Show 2 more definitions
  1. 6
    a gap between cloud masses wordnet
  2. 7
    A shallow place in a stream; a ford.
Verb
  1. 1
    To form a rift; to split open. intransitive
  2. 2
    To belch.
  3. 3
    past participle of rive form-of, obsolete, participle, past

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

  4. 4
    To cleave; to rive; to split. transitive

    "to rift an oak"

Synonyms

All synonyms
ruptureabysmabyssalienationarroyobirthmark

Example

More examples

"My granddaughter's behaviour has caused a rift in our family."

Etymology

Etymology 1

From Middle English rift, of North Germanic origin; akin to Danish rift, Norwegian Bokmål rift (“breach”), Old Norse rífa (“to tear”). More at rive.

Etymology 2

From Old Norse rypta.

Related phrases

rift sawrift valleyrift zone

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.