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fissure

UK/ˈfɪʃ.ə/US/ˈfɪʃ.ɚ/
nounC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #11,025 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: fissures

A fissure is a long narrow crack. A fissure in the rock, a deep fissure, fissures opening.

It is narrow relative to its length, which is what separates it from a hole. In medicine a fissure is a small tear, and in politics it is a split in a party.

United States Geological Survey · Public domain

Definitions of fissure

  1. 1nounfissureA long narrow crack.C1

    “A fissure ran the whole length of the wall by the spring.”

fissure is a crack.

Where it comes from

Latin fissura means a cleft, from findere, to split.

  1. Middle English

    fissure

  2. English, today

    fissure

From Middle English fissure. From Middle English fissure, from Old French fissure, from Latin fissūra (“a cleft, chink”), from findō + -tūra.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

fissure in the wild

  • The inner visceral pleura divides each lung as fissures into sections called lobes.

    Lung

  • An anal fissure is a break or tear in the skin of the anal canal.

    Anal fissure

  • Fissures persisting for longer than 4 weeks, or recurrent fissures, are defined as chronic.

    Anal fissure

  • The lateral sulcus (or lateral fissure, also called Sylvian fissure, after Franciscus Sylvius) is the most prominent sulcus of each cerebral hemisphere in the human brain.

    Lateral sulcus

  • The lateral sulcus is a deep fissure in each hemisphere that separates the frontal and parietal lobes from the temporal lobe.

    Lateral sulcus

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.