rift

• enPR: rĭft, IPA^(key): /ɹɪft/

• Audio (US):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ɪft
• Homophone: riffed

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

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.

   • 1863, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Enceladus”, in Birds of Passage‎^[1]:

     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

   • 1897, Bram Stoker, chapter II, in Dracula, New York, N.Y.: Modern Library, →OCLC:

     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.

   • 1918, John Muir, Steep Trails‎^[2]:

     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; […] .

2. (figurative) 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.

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

     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. A break in the clouds, fog, mist etc., which allows light through.
   • 1931, William Faulkner, Sanctuary, Vintage, published 1993, page 130:

     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. A shallow place in a stream; a ford.

• → Portuguese: rifte

rift (third-person singular simple present rifts, present participle rifting, simple past and past participle rifted)

1. (intransitive) To form a rift; to split open.
2. (transitive) To cleave; to rive; to split.

   to rift an oak

   • 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)]:

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

   • 1822, William Wordsworth, A Jewish Family (in a small valley opposite St. Goar, upon the Rhine)‎^[4], lines 9–11:

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

   • 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, [5]

     he stopped rigid as one petrified and gazed through the rifted logs of the raft into the water.

From Old Norse rypta.

rift (third-person singular simple present rifts, present participle rifting, simple past and past participle rifted)

1. (obsolete outside Scotland and northern UK) To belch.

rift (obsolete)

1. past participle of rive

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

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

     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.

• FTIR, frit

From the verb rive.

• IPA^(key): [ˈʁɛfd]

rift c (singular definite riften, plural indefinite rifter)

1. a rip, tear (in fabric)
2. a scratch (on skin, paint)

• “rift” in Den Danske Ordbog

rift m (plural rifts)

1. (geology) rift

From the verb rive.

rift f or m (definite singular rifta or riften, indefinite plural rifter, definite plural riftene)

1. a rip, tear (in fabric)
2. a break (in the clouds)
3. a scratch (on skin, paint)
4. a rift (geology)

• riftdal

• “rift” in The Bokmål Dictionary.
• “rift” in Det Norske Akademis ordbok (NAOB).

From the verb rive or riva.

rift f (definite singular rifta, indefinite plural rifter, definite plural riftene)

1. a rip, tear (in fabric)
2. a break (in the clouds)
3. a scratch (on skin, paint)
4. a rift (geology)

• riftdal

• “rift” in The Nynorsk Dictionary.

From Proto-Germanic *riftą, *riftiją, perhaps from Proto-Indo-European *h₁rebʰ- (“to cover; arch over; vault”). Cognate with Old High German peinrefta (“legwear; leggings”), Old Norse ript, ripti (“a kind of cloth; linen jerkin”).

• IPA^(key): /rift/

rift n (nominative plural rift)

1. a veil; curtain; cloak

• rifte

• Middle English: rift

Borrowed from French rift.

rift n (plural rifturi)

1. rift

From Old Norse rypta.

rift (third-person singular simple present rifts, present participle riftin, simple past riftit, past participle riftit)

1. to belch, burp