Sceadan

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. Old English verb meaning to cut apart or split something into parts ; to tell one thing from another by noticing their differences
2. To part or sever one thing from another in space or kind ; to recognize and judge the difference between two or more things
3. Meaning to divide something into separate portions ; meaning to perceive and mark out the distinction between items

Etymology: Old English "sceadan" meant to separate, divide, or distinguish one thing from another. It was a strong verb, so its past tense changed its vowel, as in "scead." It survives today as "shed," whose original sense of parting or separating is still visible in "shed tears" and "shed a skin," where something is cast off or parted from the body. The noun "watershed," for a ridge that divides one river system from another, keeps the dividing sense in a more literal form. The root goes back to a Proto-Indo-European base meaning "to split," which also produced the Latin "scindere" (to cut or split) and the Greek "schizein" (to split). English "schism" and "scissors" are descendants of those words, so this Old English verb is a distant relative of both.