bifurcate

present singular third person bifurcates · participle present bifurcating · participle past bifurcated · past bifurcated

1. intransitiveTo divide or fork into two channels or branches.

   2 more examples

   A considerable switch is to take place between Charing Cross and Cannon Street as termini for existing trains, in order to develop parallel working over the flat junction at Borough Market, where the two routes bifurcate (four tracks to Cannon Street and two to Charing Cross), as many as 20 times in the maximum hour, when the junction will handle 104 trains in all.

   1964 December 28, “Southern raises capacity of Borough Market Junction”, in Modern Railways, page 417

   Elizabeth's disturbing presentation of herself as both virginal and sexual bifurcated after her death into opinion about whether she was virginal or sexual, so that on the one hand Elizabeth was apotheosized as the saint who through her refusal to marry had kept England Protestant and free, while on the other hand she was still the object of detraction by persons such as “one Sheapheard, a barrister of Lincolns Inn, [and] a base Jesuited papist,” who during James I's reign uttered ”base and scandalous” words regarding the late queen's honor.

   1994, M. Lindsey Kaplan, Katherine Eggert, ““Good queen, my lord, good queen” - Sexual Slander and the Trials of Female Authority in “The Winter's Tale””, in Renaissance Drama, volume 25, →DOI, page 91 of 89–118

2. transitiveTo cause to bifurcate.

   The forces that reduce two people to a Goodreads recommendation have bifurcated us politically, and that day we saw the virtual, intangible dangers of this attention economy turn very real: thousands of violent rioters, radicalised online, seemingly brainwashed, fighting with guns for a lie.

   2021 January 22, Lilah Raptopoulos, “My tug-of-war with algorithms”, in Financial Times, archived from the original on 22 Jan 2021

1. not comparableDivided or forked into two; bifurcated.
2. not comparableHaving bifurcations.