Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The act or process of diverging.
  • noun The state of being divergent.
  • noun The degree by which things diverge.
  • noun A departure from a norm; a deviation. synonym: deviation.
  • noun A difference between or among items: synonym: difference.
  • noun 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.
  • noun Mathematics The property or manner of diverging; failure to approach a limit.
  • noun Physiology A turning of both eyes outward from a common point or of one eye when the other is fixed.
  • noun Meteorology A condition characterized by the uniform expansion in volume of a mass of air over a region, usually accompanied by fair dry weather.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun 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.
  • noun Departure from a course or standard; differentiation in action or character; deviation: as, the divergence of religious sects; divergence from rectitude.
  • noun In mathematics, the negative of the scalar part of the result of operating with the Hamiltonian operator upon a vector function.
  • noun In botany, gradual separation during the process of lengthening, as in the pods of Asclepias.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A receding from each other in moving from a common center; the state of being divergent.
  • noun Disagreement; difference.

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

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

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

  • noun a variation that deviates from the standard or norm
  • noun an infinite series that has no limit
  • noun a difference between conflicting facts or claims or opinions
  • noun the act of moving away in different direction from a common point

Etymologies

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  • So many definitions, so much new knowledge!

    October 5, 2011