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A character used in musical notation to determine the position and pitch of the scale as represented on the staff.

Incised nearly to the midrob; as, a cleft leaf.

Having a cloven foot.

To ingraft by cleaving the stock and inserting a scion. Mortimer.

Divided about half way from the border to the base into two segments; bifid.

An alto singer. Alto clef (Mus.) the counter-tenor clef, or the C clef, placed so that the two strokes include the middle line of the staff. Moore.

An opening; an open space; a gap, cleft, or chasm; a passage perforated; a hole; as, an aperture in a wall. An aperture between the mountains. Gilpin. The back aperture of the nostrils. Owen.

Deep or grave in tone. Bass clef (Mus.), the character placed at the beginning of the staff containing the bass part of a musical composition. [See Illust. under Clef.] -- Bass voice, a deepsounding voice; a voice fitted for singing bass.

Cleft to the middle or slightly beyond the middle; opening with a cleft; divided by a linear sinus, with straight margins.

side of the throat of fishes and amphibians. See Illustration in Appendix. -- Branchial clefts, the openings between the branchial arches through which water passes.

16th and 17th centuries. See 4th Bill. Many time, but for a sallet, my brainpan had been cleft with a brown bill. Shak.

s signature; also, the third note of the relative minor scale of the same (b) C after the clef is the mark of common time, in which each measure is a semibreve (four fourths or crotchets); for alla breve time it is written (c) The "C clef," a modification of the letter C, placed on any line of the staff, abows that lin…

A cleft, crack, or chink, as in the surface of the earth, or in the skin.

Full of chaps; cleft; gaping; open.

A deep opening made by disruption, as a breach in the earth or a rock; a yawning abyss; a cleft; a fissure. That deep, romantic chasm which slanted down the green hill. Coleridge.

cow; to ruminate; hence, to meditate. Every beast the parteth the hoof, and cleaveth the cleft into two claws, and cheweth the cud among the beasts, that ye shall eat. Deut. xxiv. 6.

A chink or cleft; a narrow and deep ravine; as, Shanklin Chine in the Isle of Wight, a quarter of a mile long and 230 feet deep. [Prov. Eng.] "The cottage in a chine." J. Ingelow.

A small cleft, rent, or fissure, of greater length than breadth; a gap or crack; as, the chinks of wall. Through one cloudless chink, in a black, stormy sky. Shines out the dewy morning star. Macaulay.

Full of chinks or fissures; gaping; opening in narrow clefts. Dryden.

A crack or cleft. See Chap.