One picture holds this whole word: something solid has been split along a line, and the line is still there. Think of a rock face with a narrow gap running down it. The two sides used to be one thing. Now there is a space between them, wide at the top and closing as it goes in. Everything else cleft does is this picture put somewhere new — on a chin, on a lip, on a leaf, on a hoof, on a stick, even on a sentence.
From the word’s history
Wiktionary traces cleft to Middle English clift, Old English ġeclyft, and analyses it as cleave (to split) plus the noun-forming -t. So the word is built out of the verb for splitting: first the action, then the thing the action leaves behind.
依據 Wiktionary，cleft 來自中古英文 clift、古英文 ġeclyft，結構上是動詞 cleave（劈開）加上構成名詞的 -t。所以這個字本來就是從「劈開」長出來的：先有動作，才有動作留下來的那道縫。這也說明了為什麼 cleft 既是名詞「裂縫」，又同時是 cleave 的過去形式。
Wiktionary (kaikki extract) entry for cleft, etymology 1; source_ref kaikki:3f6f69a190036ae4:574069691:16039
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