"kleft" meaning in English

See kleft in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Forms: klefts [plural]
Etymology: Ultimately from Greek κλέφτης (kléftis, “thief”). Etymology templates: {{der|en|el|κλέφτης||thief}} Greek κλέφτης (kléftis, “thief”) Head templates: {{en-noun}} kleft (plural klefts)
  1. (now historical) A type of brigand operating in the mountains of pre-Revolutionary Greece. Tags: historical Categories (place): Greece Synonyms: klepht
    Sense id: en-kleft-en-noun-WwJEX146 Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header

Inflected forms

Download JSON data for kleft meaning in English (2.4kB)

{
  "etymology_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "en",
        "2": "el",
        "3": "κλέφτης",
        "4": "",
        "5": "thief"
      },
      "expansion": "Greek κλέφτης (kléftis, “thief”)",
      "name": "der"
    }
  ],
  "etymology_text": "Ultimately from Greek κλέφτης (kléftis, “thief”).",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "klefts",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {},
      "expansion": "kleft (plural klefts)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
          "parents": [
            "Entries with incorrect language header",
            "Entry maintenance"
          ],
          "source": "w"
        },
        {
          "kind": "place",
          "langcode": "en",
          "name": "Greece",
          "orig": "en:Greece",
          "parents": [
            "Europe",
            "Earth",
            "Eurasia",
            "Nature",
            "All topics",
            "Fundamental"
          ],
          "source": "w"
        }
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1972, Douglas Dakin, The Unification of Greece, 1770-1923, page 18",
          "text": "True, the klefts often mulcted the villages, but at least they were Greeks, and they reduced considerably the marauding activities of the Albanians who in the second half of the eighteenth century were expanding westwards.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1988, Niki Watts, The Greek Folk Songs, page 60",
          "text": "The fear Greek peasants had of the klefts is commented upon by the evidence of an English traveller, Leake, who was impressed by a monument he saw raised in honour of a local leader who had been killed in a fight against the klefts.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1994, Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Minerva, published 1995, page 271",
          "text": "This kind of thing had not happened since his great-grandfather's time, in the days when those andartes were called klefts.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2019, Roderick Beaton, Greece: The Biography of a Modern Nation, Penguin, published 2020, page 38",
          "text": "We find much the same set of attitudes in the very many songs that have been preserved from the oral tradition that are dedicate to the lives, and usually also the violent deaths, of the mountain brigands known as klefts.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A type of brigand operating in the mountains of pre-Revolutionary Greece."
      ],
      "id": "en-kleft-en-noun-WwJEX146",
      "links": [
        [
          "brigand",
          "brigand"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(now historical) A type of brigand operating in the mountains of pre-Revolutionary Greece."
      ],
      "synonyms": [
        {
          "word": "klepht"
        }
      ],
      "tags": [
        "historical"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "kleft"
}
{
  "etymology_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "en",
        "2": "el",
        "3": "κλέφτης",
        "4": "",
        "5": "thief"
      },
      "expansion": "Greek κλέφτης (kléftis, “thief”)",
      "name": "der"
    }
  ],
  "etymology_text": "Ultimately from Greek κλέφτης (kléftis, “thief”).",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "klefts",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {},
      "expansion": "kleft (plural klefts)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        "English countable nouns",
        "English entries with incorrect language header",
        "English lemmas",
        "English nouns",
        "English terms derived from Greek",
        "English terms with historical senses",
        "English terms with quotations",
        "Quotation templates to be cleaned",
        "en:Greece"
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1972, Douglas Dakin, The Unification of Greece, 1770-1923, page 18",
          "text": "True, the klefts often mulcted the villages, but at least they were Greeks, and they reduced considerably the marauding activities of the Albanians who in the second half of the eighteenth century were expanding westwards.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1988, Niki Watts, The Greek Folk Songs, page 60",
          "text": "The fear Greek peasants had of the klefts is commented upon by the evidence of an English traveller, Leake, who was impressed by a monument he saw raised in honour of a local leader who had been killed in a fight against the klefts.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1994, Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Minerva, published 1995, page 271",
          "text": "This kind of thing had not happened since his great-grandfather's time, in the days when those andartes were called klefts.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2019, Roderick Beaton, Greece: The Biography of a Modern Nation, Penguin, published 2020, page 38",
          "text": "We find much the same set of attitudes in the very many songs that have been preserved from the oral tradition that are dedicate to the lives, and usually also the violent deaths, of the mountain brigands known as klefts.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A type of brigand operating in the mountains of pre-Revolutionary Greece."
      ],
      "links": [
        [
          "brigand",
          "brigand"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(now historical) A type of brigand operating in the mountains of pre-Revolutionary Greece."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "historical"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "synonyms": [
    {
      "word": "klepht"
    }
  ],
  "word": "kleft"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-06-04 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (e9e0a99 and db5a844). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.