You can think of a cleat as one small hard piece bolted onto a much bigger surface, put there so that something else will not slide. The piece is never the main thing. A rope, a shoe, a loose board — that is what matters, and the cleat is the little lump that keeps it where it should be. Once you hold that picture, the boat fitting, the bumps under a sports shoe and the strip screwed across a door are all the same idea in different places.
From the word’s history
The supplied Wiktionary entry traces cleat to Middle English clete and Old English *cleat, a block or wedge, from a root meaning a firm lump, and names German Kloss (a clump) as a cognate. That old lump is still visible in every modern use: a cleat is a hard little mass fixed onto something bigger.
資料裡的 Wiktionary 條目說 cleat 來自中古英語 clete、古英語 *clēat（塊、楔），更早的字根有「結成一團的硬塊」的意思，並列出德文 Kloß（麵團塊）為同源詞。那個「硬塊」到今天還看得見：cleat 就是被固定在大東西上的一小團硬物。
Wiktionary, "cleat"
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