Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Cloven-hoofed.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Having the foot divided into parts; cloven-hoofed; fissiped.
  • In ornithology, having the webs of a palmate foot deeply incised, so that the foot is almost semipalmate, as in a tern of the genus Hydrochelidon, the Larus fissipes or cloven-footed gull of early authors.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective Having the foot or hoof divided into two parts, as the ox.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective having the foot divided into parts; cloven-hoofed; fissiped

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective of or relating to the cloven feet of ruminants or swine

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Middle English clovefote, from cloven + foot + -ed.

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Examples

  • The attraction said, “A newly discovered animal, comprising the head and eye of an elephant, the horns of an antelope, a long black beard, the hind parts of a lion, the foreparts of a bison, cloven-footed, has a flowing mane from shoulder to fetlock joint and chews the cud.”

    Boing Boing 2009

  • This deity seems to have passed from the Greek and Roman religions into the Christian story as the sexualized cloven-footed Satin by way of the Persian/Zoroastrian Angra Mainyu?

    Pan and Satyrs James Gurney 2009

  • Somebody, somewhere in this state must be listening, surely we can't be this stupid to allow this into the mainland, let alone inside Kansas. excerpt Scientists, farmers and government officials for 80 years have kept the U.S. mainland free of the virus that causes foot-and-mouth disease — a horrific, highly contagious killer of cloven-footed livestock such as cattle.

    Stan Cox: Keep the Germ Labs Quarantined Michael Caddell 2008

  • For example, if one uses the differentia footed to divide the genus animal, one then uses a differentia such as cloven-footed for the next division.

    Aristotle's Metaphysics Cohen, S. Marc 2008

  • Somebody, somewhere in this state must be listening, surely we can't be this stupid to allow this into the mainland, let alone inside Kansas. excerpt Scientists, farmers and government officials for 80 years have kept the U.S. mainland free of the virus that causes foot-and-mouth disease — a horrific, highly contagious killer of cloven-footed livestock such as cattle.

    Archive 2008-09-01 Michael Caddell 2008

  • If we had descended to the next order of spectators, we should have found an equal degree of abhorrence, though less of noise and scurrility; yet here the good women gave Black George to the devil, and many of them expected every minute that the cloven-footed gentleman would fetch his own.

    The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling 2004

  • The old wretch, whom divers of our sailors supposed to be either a devil or a witch, had her buskins plucked off to see if she were cloven-footed, and for her ugly hue and deformity we let her go; the young woman and the child we brought away.

    The North-West Passage 2003

  • The reason of this is that the one-hoofed produce one young one, and the cloven-footed either one or two generally speaking; now it is easy to bring the few to perfection.

    On the Generation of Animals 2002

  • We have formerly given the reason why some animals are large, some smaller, and some between the two, and speaking generally, with regard to the number of young produced, the solid-hoofed produce one, the cloven-footed few, the many-toed many.

    On the Generation of Animals 2002

  • A proof of this is that the elephant is the largest of animals and yet is many-toed, and the camel, the next largest, is cloven-footed.

    On the Generation of Animals 2002

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