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What Do “Cleft” and “Bite” Actually Mean?

"Back off, boys!"

3 min readApr 15, 2025

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Photo by Dan Dennis on Unsplash

You’ve almost certainly seen the hashtag ‘#cleftbite’ recently. It’s all over social media, usually under a picture of a Hollywood actress, a British duchess, or a record-setting OnlyFans attention-seeker.

But what does this esoteric neologism — ‘cleftbite’ — actually mean?

Well, it’s a closed compound of two common words, ‘cleft’ and ‘bite’, so let’s spread that apart and examine it.

cleft: [noun] an opening made by or for splitting

and

bite: [verb] the use of teeth to cut or wound

So, by simple inference, a cleftbite is ‘an opening made for splitting which uses teeth to wound’.

No wiser? Time for a lesson in folklore…

Vagina Dentata

A Latin phrase meaning ‘toothed vagina’, vagina dentata is a motif found in ancient folk tales across many cultures in which a vagina is claimed to contain teeth, so that sexual intercourse or rape could result in injury, emasculation, or castration.

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Not the Median Log
Not the Median Log

Published in Not the Median Log

A place for nonsense inspired by misreading the titles of stories from the Medium Blog, Medium Newsletter, and Staff Pick section

Marsha Adams
Marsha Adams

Written by Marsha Adams

Autistic author. Usually found hiding behind a book.

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