divarication

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.