Cleft - cloven

’’’Cleft’’’ and ’’’cloven’’’ are the two accepted variant forms of the -ed participle of the verb ‘to cleave’ meaning ‘to split’. Either may be used with the auxiliary verbs ‘to have’ and ‘to be’; but there are conventional differences in their uses as participial adjectives. (There is only a very rare, negligible, use of ’’’cloven’’’ as a noun, although ‘a cleft' is fairly common to label any gap as the result of splitting, or figurative equivalents. It is a way of naming the vulva, or pudendal cleft.)

• As participial adjectives,
  • ’’’cleft’’’ is used with such physical processes as cleft lips and cleft palates ('orofacial clefts'); the use 'cloven palate' is extremely rare ('cloven lip' is slightly more common, because of its use in the names of various plants): in current academic English these would be judged errors. A cleft stick was literally a stick split at one end used to carry paper messages ('letters') by 'native runners' between colonizing officials in British imperial Africa in the nineteenth century; it is currently more often used figuratively to mean 'a situation neither of whose outcomes will be beneficial' (cf. horns of a dilemma). In thgius [p[figurative]] meaning,
  • ’’’Cloven’’’ is used with animal feet, normally “the divided hoof of ruminant quadrupeds” (OED). This came to be associated above all with Satan and the other devils. The link appears to be because Satan was identified with the Greek god Pan, portrayed with the feet and legs of a goat, and said to have many habits judged in Christianity as 'immoral'. Cloven is sometimes, but not often, used in the phrase 'a cloven stick', where cleft stick is the usual form.

• Robert Bridges included in his List 7 of homophones in English the homograph clove (substantive, i.e. the name of a spice and the tree that bears it, Caryophyllus aromaticus or Eugenia caryophyllus) and clove (fr[om], i.e. past tense of, cleave, 'to split'). Users of AWE may also come across the name of the knot called a clove-hitch, because it is tied on a spar or another rope, with essentially two loops that cross, giving the visual impression that it is one knot that has been split.