Etymology From Middle English rift, of North Germanic origin; akin to Danish rift, Norwegian Bokmål rift (“breach”), Old Norse rífa (“to tear”). More at rive.
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.
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 down1863, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Enceladus”, in Birds of Passage:
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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
Figuratively 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.
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:
Etymology From Middle English rift, of North Germanic origin; akin to Danish rift, Norwegian Bokmål rift (“breach”), Old Norse rífa (“to tear”). More at rive.
1
To form a rift; to split open.
2
To cleave; to rive; to split.
to rift an oak
to the dread rattling thunder / Have I given fire and rifted Jove's stout oak / With his own bolt1610–1611 (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)]:
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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.