rift – English noun declension

English noun forms of rift

Noun: rift
Singularrift
Pluralrifts

Sample Sentences

  • 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 down [1863, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Enceladus”, in Birds of Passage:]
  • 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:]
  • 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:]
  • 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. See: Middle English Nouns 'rift', Danish Nouns 'rift', Norwegian Bokmål Nouns 'rift', Old Norse Nouns 'rífa'.