bifurcate
verb
bī-ˈfər-
Did you know?
Yogi Berra, the baseball great who was noted for his head-scratching quotes, is purported to have said, "When you come to a fork in the road, take it." Berra's advice might not offer much help when you're making tough decisions in life, but perhaps it will help you remember bifurcate. A road that bifurcates splits in two, like the one in Berra's adage. Other things can bifurcate (or be bifurcated) as well, such as an organization that splits, or is split, into two factions. Bifurcate comes from the Latin adjective bifurcus, meaning "two-pronged," a combination of the prefix bi- ("two") and the noun furca ("fork"). Furca, as you may have guessed, is also an ancestor of fork, which refers to the handy utensil that can (in a pinch) help us—as Berra might say—to cut our pizza in four pieces when we're not hungry enough to eat six.
Examples of bifurcate in a Sentence
Tax Notes Staff, Forbes, 29 Oct. 2024
So the market has bifurcated, with roughly half of buyers preferring something perfect from a lab, and the other half still preferring something that maybe has romantic flaws.
—Felix Salmon, Axios, 12 Oct. 2024
Financial Services Lennar’s Financial Services operations are bifurcated through functionality in Residential Mortgage Financing, Title, Insurance & Closing Services and Commercial Mortgage Origination.
—Joe Cornell, Forbes, 10 Oct. 2024
And then the second big thesis was that scale was going to matter more than ever in our industry, and technology was being a big driver of that, bifurcating the industry into the haves and the have-nots.
—Jane Thier, Fortune, 6 Oct. 2024
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Dictionary Entries Near bifurcate
Cite this Entry
“Bifurcate.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bifurcate. Accessed 30 Nov. 2024.
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bifurcate
intransitive verb
bī-ˈfər-
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