divarication •
\dye-vair-uh-KAY-shun\ • noun 1 : the action, process, or fact of
spreading apart 2 : a divergence of opinion
Examples:The team of
botanists studied the growth patterns of the trees, including the
divarication
of their branches.
"For journalists,
the futurists were at worst nothing more than a further example of the
divarication between the world of art and the
tastes of the public.…" — Luca Somigli, Legitimizing the Artist, 2003
Did you know? There's
no reason to prevaricate about the origins of divarication—the word derives
from the Medieval Latin divaricatio, which in turn descends from the verb
divaricare, meaning "to spread apart." Divaricare itself is derived
from the Latin varicare, which means "to straddle" and is also an
ancestor of prevaricate ("to deviate from the truth"). The oldest
sense of divarication, which first appeared in print in English in 1578, refers
to a literal branching apart (as in "divarication of the roads"). The
word eventually developed a more metaphorical second sense that is used when opinions "stretch apart"
from one another.
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