# partition

> English word · Noun · IPA /pɑɹˈtɪ.ʃən/ · frequency rank #11,758

## Definitions
1. An action which divides a thing into parts, or separates one thing from another.
2. A part of something that has been divided.
3. An approach to division in which one asks what the size of each part is, rather than (as in quotition) how many parts there are.
4. The division of a territory into two or more autonomous ones.
5. A vertical structure that divides a room.
6. That which divides or separates; that by which different things, or distinct parts of the same thing, are separated; boundary; dividing line or space.
7. A part divided off by walls; an apartment; a compartment.
8. The severance of common or undivided interests, particularly in real estate. It may be effected by consent of parties, or by compulsion of law.
9. A section of a hard disk separately formatted.
10. A division of a database or one of its constituting elements such as tables into separate independent parts.
11. A division of a data stream, such as a messaging queue or topic (often representing a unit of parallelism, and of fault tolerance).
12. A collection of non-empty, disjoint subsets of a set whose union is the set itself (i.e. all elements of the set are contained in exactly one of the subsets).
13. A musical score.

## Etymology
Recorded c.1430, "division into shares, distinction," from Middle English particioun, from Old French particion (modern partition), from Latin partitio, partitionem (“division, portion”), from partitus, the past participle of partire (“to split (up), part(ition)”).

## Easily confused with
- **petition** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/partition-vs-petition)

## Common misspellings (14)
`aprtition`, `parittion`, `parrtition`, `partiiton`, `partision`, `partitino`, `partitionn`, `partitoin`, `partittion`, `parttiion`, `parttition`, `patrition`, `ppartition`, `pratition`

## Source
Compiled from Wiktionary via kaikki.org (CC BY-SA). Data vintage: 2026-05-06.
Canonical page: https://plainspell.com/en/word/partition