Learn English – What’s the opposite of “concatenate” in programming

antonymssingle-word-requests

To concatenate means to string together different things. Concatenating "snow" and "ball" produces "snowball." But what would the opposite action be? What is the name of the action used to derive two words from one?

(My dictionaries don't list any antonyms, and Googling revealed how to do the opposite but not what it's called.)

Edit: I had programming parlance in mind, so I've reflected that in the question title.

Best Answer

Looking strictly at the Latin roots of concatenate:

concatenare, from Latin com- + catenare, to chain [MW]

com- is the Latin prefix meaning "together, with."

dis- is the Latin prefix meaning "apart."

(de- means "down or away from," so you can make the case for that as well.)

So: discatenate, or decatenate.

Edit: As I (and FF) noted in a comment, decatenate is used in biology/biochemistry to describe the unlinking of a chain of chemical elements.

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