divergence

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun The act or process of diverging.
• noun The state of being divergent.
• noun The degree by which things diverge.
• noun A departure from a norm; a deviation. synonym: deviation.
• noun A difference between or among items: synonym: difference.
• noun Biology The evolutionary tendency or process by which animals or plants that are descended from a common ancestor evolve into different forms when living under different conditions.
• noun Mathematics The property or manner of diverging; failure to approach a limit.
• noun Physiology A turning of both eyes outward from a common point or of one eye when the other is fixed.
• noun Meteorology A condition characterized by the uniform expansion in volume of a mass of air over a region, usually accompanied by fair dry weather.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun The act or state of diverging, or moving or pointing in different directions (not directly opposed) from a common point; a receding one from another: opposed to convergence: as, the divergence of lines.
• noun Departure from a course or standard; differentiation in action or character; deviation: as, the divergence of religious sects; divergence from rectitude.
• noun In mathematics, the negative of the scalar part of the result of operating with the Hamiltonian operator upon a vector function.
• noun In botany, gradual separation during the process of lengthening, as in the pods of Asclepias.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• noun A receding from each other in moving from a common center; the state of being divergent.
• noun Disagreement; difference.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun The degree to which two or more things diverge.
• noun mathematics the operator which maps a function F=(F1, ... Fn) from a n-dimensional vector space to itself to the number
• noun obsolete disagreement; difference

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun a variation that deviates from the standard or norm
• noun an infinite series that has no limit
• noun a difference between conflicting facts or claims or opinions
• noun the act of moving away in different direction from a common point