separation

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

• noun The act or process of moving apart or forcing something apart.
• noun The condition of being apart, especially the condition of two people who had lived together or been married living in different places.
• noun An interval or space that separates; a gap.
• noun The process of sorting or distinguishing into different components, groups, or categories.
• noun The condition of being so sorted or distinguished.
• noun The voluntary cessation by spouses of cohabitation and other marital relations.
• noun A formal legal severing of the relations between spouses that does not dissolve the marriage as in divorce.
• noun In some jurisdictions, divorce.
• noun Discharge, as from employment or military service.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun In astrology, the condition when two significators have lately been in aspect and the aspect is just over.
• noun In horticulture, the method of propagating plants by means of naturally separable parts, as offsets, small bulbs that spring from a mother bulb, or detachable buds.
• noun The act of separating, removing, or disconnecting one thing from another; a disjoining or disjunction: as, the separation of the soul from the body; the separation of the good from the bad.
• noun The operation of disuniting or decomposing substances; chemical analysis.
• noun The state of being separate; disunion; disconnection; separate existence.
• noun Specifically, a limited divorce, or divorce from bed and board without a dissolution of the marriage tie. This may be by common consent or by decree of a court; in the latter case it is called a judicial separation. See divorce.
• noun In music:
• noun A passing-note between two tones a third apart.
• noun In organ-building, a contrivance introduced into instruments where the great organ keyboard has a pneumatic action, enabling the player to use that keyboard without sounding the pipes belonging to it, even though its stops may be more or less drawn.
• noun A body of persons separated in fact or doctrine from the rest of the community; a body of separatists or nonconformists; specifically, in the seventeenth century, the Puritans collectively.

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

• noun Chemical analysis.
• noun Divorce.
• noun (Steam Boilers) The operation of removing water from steam.
• noun (Law) a form of divorce; a separation of man and wife which has the effect of making each a single person for all legal purposes but without ability to contract a new marriage.

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

• noun The act of separating or the condition of being separated.
• noun The place at which a division occurs.
• noun An interval, gap or space that separates things.
• noun law An agreement terminating a relationship between husband and wife, but short of a divorce.

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

• noun the social act of separating or parting company
• noun the act of dividing or disconnecting
• noun the state of lacking unity
• noun sorting one thing from others
• noun the space where a division or parting occurs
• noun coming apart
• noun the termination of employment (by resignation or dismissal)
• noun the distance between things
• noun (law) the cessation of cohabitation of man and wife (either by mutual agreement or under a court order)