cleaving
"cleaving" is a 8-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“cleaving” is uncommon English (frequency #65,782 among 43,570 “C” headwords), classed as a verb. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- #65,782
- frequency rank, English
- 43,570
- “C” headwords
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - present participle and gerund of cleave
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | cleaving |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| Letters | 8 |
| Frequency rank | #65,782 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “cleaving” sits in English frequency
Rare enough to double-check
cleaving is uncommon English at frequency #65,782 among 43,570 “C” headwords, classed as averb. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "present participle and gerund of cleave".
Zero misspellings are on record for cleaving in our index, a straightforward case of a spelling with little room for common typos. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, a sign it's visually distinctive enough not to be mixed up with another word.
No explicit etymology string is stored for this entry, leaving phoneme-to-grapheme mapping as the best guide to its spelling rather than a borrowing history. The correct English form is cleaving, spelled C-L-E-A-V-I-N-G.
Definition
- 1present participle and gerund of cleave
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA); frequency ordering uses the FrequencyWords open word-frequency list (2018 English corpus, MIT). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “cleaving”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct English spelling is C-L-E-A-V-I-N-G - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Browse more English words and confusable pairs in the same reference. English words
Other uncommon English words near this rank
Data Source
Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Word ordering uses an open word-frequency list; misspelling variants are generated by edit-distance from the correct headword.