• enPR: rĭft, IPA: /ɹɪft/

rift (plural rifts)

1. A chasm or fissure.

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

   The Grand Canyon is a rift in the Earth's surface, but is smaller than some of the undersea ones.

2. A break in the clouds, fog, mist etc., which allows light through.
   • 1931, William Faulkner, Sanctuary, Vintage 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.

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

• French: fente, fissure
• German: Riss
• Russian: тре́щина
• Spanish: cisma, fisura

• French: percée, éclaircie
• Russian: просве́т

rift (rifts, present participle rifting; 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, William Shakespeare, “The Tempest”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies: Published According to the True Originall Copies (First Folio), London: Printed by Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, OCLC 606515358 ↗, [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)" 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,

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

rift (rifts, present participle rifting; past and past participle rifted)

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

1. Past participle of rive

   The mightie trunck halfe rent, with ragged rift

   Doth roll adowne the rocks, and fall with fearefull drift.