divergence

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. The act of diverging.
2. n. The state of being divergent.
3. n. The degree by which things diverge.
4. n. Physiology A turning of both eyes outward from a common point or of one eye when the other is fixed.
5. n. Departure from a norm; deviation.
6. n. Difference, as of opinion. See Synonyms at deviation, difference.
7. n. Biology The evolutionary tendency or process by which animals or plants that are descended from a common ancestor evolve into different forms when living under different conditions.
8. n. Mathematics The property or manner of diverging; failure to approach a limit.
9. n. A meteorological condition characterized by the uniform expansion in volume of a mass of air over a region, usually accompanied by fair dry weather.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. The act or state of diverging, or moving or pointing in different directions (not directly opposed) from a common point; a receding one from another: opposed to convergence: as, the divergence of lines.
2. n. Departure from a course or standard; differentiation in action or character; deviation: as, the divergence of religious sects; divergence from rectitude.
3. n. In mathematics, the negative of the scalar part of the result of operating with the Hamiltonian operator upon a vector function. It is so called because if the vector function represents displacements of the parts of a fluid, the divergence represents the decrement of density at any point due to this displacement.
4. n. In botany, gradual separation during the process of lengthening, as in the pods of Asclepias.

Wiktionary

1. n. The degree to which two or more things diverge.
2. n. mathematics the operator which maps a function F=(F1, ... Fn) from a n-dimensional vector space to itself to the number
3. n. obsolete disagreement; difference

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. A receding from each other in moving from a common center; the state of being divergent.
2. n. Disagreement; difference.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. a variation that deviates from the standard or norm
2. n. an infinite series that has no limit
3. n. a difference between conflicting facts or claims or opinions
4. n. the act of moving away in different direction from a common point