# segregation

> English word · Noun · IPA /sɛɡɹəˈɡeɪ̯ʃən/ · frequency rank #13,057

## Definitions
1. The act of setting apart and organizing things based upon their characteristics.
2. The separation of people based upon race, sex, religion, or other identity in institutions.
3. The setting apart in Mendelian inheritance of alleles, such that each parent passes only one allele to its offspring.
4. Separation from a mass, and gathering about centers or into cavities at hand through cohesive or adhesive attraction or the crystallizing process.
5. The separation of people (geographically, residentially, or in businesses, public transit, etc) into racial or other categories (e.g. religion, sex).
6. The separation of people (geographically, residentially, or in businesses, public transit, etc) into various categories which occurs due to social forces (culture, etc).
7. The separation of a pair of chromatids or chromosomes during mitosis and meiosis
8. Separation for practical reasons, by necessity.
9. The separation of a subset of prisoners from the general prison population, possibly solitary confinement.

## Etymology
1555. From Latin segregatio. Morphologically segregate + -ion.

## Common misspellings (17)
`esgregation`, `segergation`, `seggregation`, `segreagtion`, `segregaiton`, `segregasion`, `segregatino`, `segregationn`, `segregatoin`, `segregattion`, `segreggation`, `segregtaion`, `segrgeation`, `segrregation`, `sergegation`, `sgeregation`, `ssegregation`

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