- 1
If a road, a river, or a path bifurcates, it divides into two and those two parts go off on their own. Picture a capital Y: one line becomes two. People also stretch it to other things that split in two — a blood vessel, a family line, a plan that goes two ways. It is a formal, slightly scientific word. In ordinary talk we usually say splits or forks. You will meet it in geography, biology, and careful writing more than in chat.
分叉、一分為二（路、河分成兩支；偏書面）
組成A learned borrowing from Medieval Latin bifurcātus. On the surface it is bi- (two) + furcate, from Latin furca, a fork.
同家族的字
- forksame Latin furca, a two-pronged fork
- bifurcationthe noun: the split, or the place where it happens
原始詞典資料4 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
bifurcateverb/ˈbaɪfəˌkeɪt/
- 1
To divide or fork into two channels or branches.
- 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.
- 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.
- 2
To 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.
bifurcateadj/baɪˈfɛːkɪt/
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Divided or forked into two; bifurcated.
- 2
Having bifurcations.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。