Word.ws English Dictionary

divide and conquer

divide and conquer proverb: in order to rule securely, do not allow alliances between your enemies.

Proverb

divide and conquer

  1. In order to rule securely, do not allow alliances between your enemies.

Verb

divide and conquer (third-person singular simple present divides and conquers, present participle dividing and conquering, simple past and past participle divided and conquered)

  1. To use a combination of political, military and economic strategies that aim to gain and maintain power by breaking up larger concentrations of power into chunks that individually have less power than the one implementing the strategy.
    • It added that it can't begin pay talks without permission from Transport Scotland, and then cited a TSSA union survey of ScotRail that suggested that most of its members were against strikes, instead preferring job security rather than a pay rise. This prompted the TSSA to accuse ScotRail of trying...2020 December 2, Philip Haigh, “A winter of discontent caused by threat of union action”, in Rail, page 62
    Synonyms:
    divide and rule

Noun

divide and conquer (uncountable)

  1. A strategy for achieving political or military control.
  2. An algorithm design technique that solves a problem by splitting it recursively into smaller problems until all of the remaining problems are trivial.
    • The quicksort algorithm is an example of divide and conquer.
  3. A phacoemulsification technique in which the nucleus is grooved and divided into halves.

divide and conquer meaning in Tamil

divide and conquer in Tamil

பிரித்து வெல்லும், எதிரியை, பிரச்சினையை பிரித்து வெற்றி காணும்

Synonyms of divide and conquer

Forms of divide and conquer

third-person singular presentdivides and conquers
present participledividing and conquering
past participledivided and conquered
pastdivided and conquered

Origin of divide and conquer

Calque of Latin dīvide et imperā.

Questions about divide and conquer

What does divide and conquer mean?
Divide and conquer means in order to rule securely, do not allow alliances between your enemies.
What is divide and conquer in Tamil?
Divide and conquer in Tamil is பிரித்து வெல்லும், எதிரியை, பிரச்சினையை பிரித்து வெற்றி காணும். See Divide and conquer meaning in Tamil.
What part of speech is divide and conquer?
Divide and conquer can be a proverb, a verb or a noun.

Words near divide and conquer in the dictionary

  1. dividability
  2. dividable
  3. dividant
  4. divide
  5. divide and choose
  6. divide and conquer
  7. divide and rule
  8. Divide County
  9. divide the House
  10. divide up
  11. divided

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: divide and conquer (page history and authors); divide and conquer (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-divide and conquer.wav.

Cite this entry: “divide and conquer.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/divide_and_conquer. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.