Cleavage: Definition and part of speech

Cleavage

  1. n. Division into laminae, like slate, with the lamination not necessarily parallel to the plane of deposition; — usually produced by pressure.
  2. n. The act of cleaving or splitting.
  3. n. The quality possessed by many crystallized substances of splitting readily in one or more definite directions, in which the cohesive attraction is a minimum, affording more or less smooth surfaces; the direction of the dividing plane; a fragment obtained by cleaving, as of a diamond. See Parting.

The word meanings were obtained from OPTED(The Online Plain Text English Dictionary), which is based on “The Project Gutenberg Etext of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary” which is in turn based on the 1913 US Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (See Project Gutenburg), as a text file.

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