🇬🇧 Cleavage meaning: English Vocabulary Flash Card

Cleavage is what happens right after an egg cell has been fertilized and begins to grow into a baby animal or person. The one tiny cell doesn’t stay as just one cell. Instead, it starts to split into more and more cells, like a copy machine for cells. First it divides into two cells, then four, then eight, and so on. This repeating pattern of cell division, without the ball of cells getting much bigger at first, is called cleavage.

Cleavage makes more and more cells while the whole thing stays tiny, like a clown car that keeps adding clowns but never gets bigger.

If my homework multiplied like cells do in cleavage, I’d be buried under a mountain of worksheets by bedtime.

I imagined the cell during cleavage holding a meeting: “Okay team, today we split, tomorrow we split again, questions?”

Cleavage turned one quiet little egg cell into a whole crowd of cells that definitely did not respect personal space.

During early cleavage, the fertilized egg divides into many cells without getting much bigger, so it’s like a shrinking meeting room that keeps inviting more people in.

A young scientist watched a tiny cell under the microscope as cleavage began: one cell split, then cleavage doubled into two, then cleavage showed four glowing parts. She whispered as cleavage continued, counting like a prayer. Each neat cleavage lit hope. When the dish glowed with many cells, she laughed and wept—cleavage had begun a life.

This word is at the C2 level, which means it represents the highest mastery of English. It’s often used in specialized or highly formal contexts and helps you communicate with precision and subtlety, much like a native speaker.

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