divide: [14] Etymologically, divide shares its underlying notion of ‘separation’ with widow ‘woman parted from or bereft of her husband’, which comes ultimately from the same source. English acquired it from Latin dīvidere ‘split up, divide’. This was a compound verb formed from the prefix dis- ‘apart’ and -videre, a verbal element meaning ‘separate’ which is represented in Sanskrit vindháte ‘is empty’ as well as in widow, and goes back to an Indo-European base *weidh- ‘separate’.
English device and devise come ultimately from *dīvisāre, a Vulgar Latin derivative of dīvidere, and individual belongs to the same word family. => device, individual, widow
divide (v.)
early 14c., from Latin dividere "to force apart, cleave, distribute," from dis- "apart" (see dis-) + -videre "to separate," from PIE root *weidh- "to separate" (see widow; also see with).
Mathematical sense is from early 15c. Divide and rule (c. 1600) translates Latin divide et impera, a maxim of Machiavelli. Related: Divided; dividing.
divide (n.)
1640s, "act of dividing," from divide (v.). Meaning "watershed, separation between river valleys" is first recorded 1807, American English.
权威例句
1. Remove the meat with a fork and divide it among four plates.
用餐叉把肉叉走,分到4个盘里。
2. She has done more to divide the Conservatives than anyone else.
她在分裂保守党这件事上所起的作用比任何人都大。
3. Cells divide and renew as part of the human growth process.
细胞不断地分裂更新,这是人体发育过程的一部分。
4. Add them together, divide by five, and you've got the average. Okay?
把它们相加再除以5就是平均数,明白吗?
5. Measure the floor area of the greenhouse and divide it by six.
【separate, detach, allocate, divide】
这组词都有“分开”的意思,其区别是:
separate: v.人为地分开,使隔离开。
• We separated the salad forks from the dinner forks. 我们把沙拉叉与餐叉分隔开。
detach: v.拆开组合的物体;远离,疏远。
• We need a carpenter to detach this bookshelf from the wall. 我们需要一名木匠将书架从墙上拆下来。
allocate: v.分配,把……拨给。
• The city government allocated money for schools and the police in this year's budget. 市政府在今年的预算中给学校和警察部门分配了资金。
divide: v.指将整体分为若干个部分。
• The huge corporation dividedsintossmaller companies. 这家特大公司分成一些较小的公司。