Definitions

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

  • verb Present participle of rend.
  • adjective that rends

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

  • adjective resembling a sound of violent tearing as of something ripped apart or lightning splitting a tree

Etymologies

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Examples

  • I would just like to add the idea of rending our garments & gnashing our teeth.

    Marriage Equality Opponents on Civil Unions, Then and Now 2005

  • The heavy felt druggets were about as plastic as blotting paper and I derived little comfort from them until I hit upon the idea of rending them into strips.

    A Mind That Found Itself Beers, Clifford W. 1908

  • This may well be called the rending of another veil.

    The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion James Stalker 1887

  • These and other doleful cries might have been heard two hundred yards from the house; and they were accompanied by the most frantic expressions of grief, such as rending garments, tearing the hair, thumping the face and eyes, burning the body with small piercing firebrands, beating the head with stones till the blood ran, and this they called an "offering of blood" for the dead.

    Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before George Turner

  • Fortunately death saved him from the "rending" which is the portion of so many innovators and discoverers.

    The Evolution of Modern Medicine 1921

  • A kind of rending and widening process seemed to be going on within her own nature.

    Lady Connie Humphry Ward 1885

  • He now divined why his comrade had gone out twice during the week, and he felt within him a burning grief, a kind of wound, that sense of rending which is caused by treason.

    Short Stories of the Tragedy and Comedy of Life 1883

  • He now divined why his comrade had gone out twice during the week, and he felt within him a burning grief, a kind of wound, that sense of rending which is caused by treason.

    Selected Writings of Guy De Maupassant Guy de Maupassant 1871

  • From the sounds of growling and rending which issued from the thicket, he knew that the lion in question was devouring part of their buffalo-meat which had been hung on the branch of a neighbouring tree, not, however, near enough to the fires to be visible.

    Black Ivory Francis B. Pearson 1859

  • I have always appreciated that idea of "rending" the heart.

    The Anchoress The_Anchoress 2010

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