partition

1. (mathematics) 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.countableuncountable

2. (law) The severance of common or undivided interests, particularly in real estate. It may be effected by consent of parties, or by compulsion of law.countableuncountable

3. (computing) A section of a hard disk separately formatted.Examples: "The epicenter of the disturbance is the partition currently housing a [personality construct array] retrieved from Contender AI 05-032 <+> 0816."countableuncountable

4. (databases) A division of a database or one of its constituting elements such as tables into separate independent parts.countableuncountable

5. (computing) A division of a data stream, such as a messaging queue or topic (often representing a unit of parallelism, and of fault tolerance).countableuncountable

6. (set theory) 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).countableuncountable