Other forms: divorced, divorcing, divorces
A divorce is the legal ending of a marriage. Get a divorce, file for divorce, a difficult divorce.
The verb works both ways: they divorced, and she divorced him. Note that divorce is the legal process, while separation is living apart without it, and the two have different consequences in law. There is a useful figurative sense meaning to separate two things that belong together: you cannot divorce the policy from its cost, and divorced from reality is a fixed phrase. The person is a divorcee, which is spelled the same for either sex in modern usage.
1noundivorceThe legal ending of a marriage.
“The divorce took two years to come through.”
2verbendTo end a marriage legally.
“They divorced in 2009 and stayed friends.”
3verbseparateTo separate two things that belong together.
“You cannot divorce the decision from the money behind it.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
divorce is a legal separation.
Latin divortium comes from divertere, to turn aside — the same verb behind divert and diverse. A divorce is a turning apart, and the Latin word covered any separation before English narrowed it to marriage.
Proto-Indo-European
*wert-
Latin
dīvortium
Old French
divorce
English, today
divorce
Built from
Old French divorce, from Latin dīvortium, from dīvertere (“to turn aside”), from dī- (“apart”) + vertere (“to turn”); see verse.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA