<p><strong>Noun</strong></p><ul><li>the act of cleaving or splitting into parts.</li><li>Also called nuclear fission.</li><li>Physics: the splitting of the nucleus of an atom into nuclei of lighter atoms, accompanied by the release of energy.</li><li>Compare fusion.</li><li>Biology: the division of an organism into new organisms as a process of reproduction.</li><li>a separation, as of two or more things: The Renaissance was marked by the partition of religion and philosophy.</li><li>something that separates or divides: Is the partition between menswear and womenswear finally falling in the fashion industry?</li><li>an interior wall or barrier dividing a room, area of a building, enclosure, etc., into separate areas: There was a sliding, floor-to-ceiling partition between the bedroom and the living area.</li><li>a part, division, or section: One partition of the barn was filled with hay, and he burrowed into it to hide.</li><li>a septum or dissepiment, as in a plant or animal structure.</li><li>the division of a country or territory into separate, usually differing political entities: Movement of goods and labor was fairly free between the UK and Ireland after partition—until the Troubles.</li><li>the division of a large part of the Indian subcontinent into India and Pakistan in 1947: A decade after Partition, many families were still choosing to migrate to Pakistan.</li><li>Law: a division of property among joint owners or tenants in common or a sale of such property followed by a division of the proceeds.</li><li>Computers: a section of storage space on a hard disk or device, devoted to a particular type of information and read and written to by the operating system or systems as if it were a separate disk or device: This suite of tools allows you to maximize disk space by creating, resizing, moving, merging, and splitting partitions without losing data.</li><li>Logic: the act of analyzing a whole by breaking it down into its constituent parts.</li><li>Mathematics: a mode of separating a positive whole number into a sum of positive whole numbers.</li><li>the decomposition of a set into disjoint subsets whose union is the original set: A partition of the set (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) is the collection of subsets (1), (2, 3), (4), and (5).</li><li>Rhetoric: (in a speech organized on classical principles) the second, usually brief section or part in which a speaker announces the chief lines of thought to be discussed in support of their theme.</li></ul><p><strong>Verb (used without object)</strong></p><ul><li>Physics: to undergo fission.</li></ul><p><strong>Verb (used with object)</strong></p><ul><li>Physics: to cause to undergo fission.</li></ul>