An instrument consisting of a handle with a shank terminating in two or more prongs or tines, which are usually of metal, parallel and slightly curved; -- used for piercing, holding, taking up, or pitching anything.

Anything furcate or like a fork in shape, or furcate at the extremity; as, a tuning fork.

One of the parts into which anything is furcated or divided; a prong; a branch of a stream, a road, etc.; a barbed point, as of an arrow.

The place where a division or a union occurs; the angle or opening between two branches or limbs; as, the fork of a river, a tree, or a road.

To divide into two or more branches; as, a road, a tree, or a stream forks.

Meeting point of two streams. "In the fork of" means between two branches.

similar to a creek; a branch or division of a stream; a reference to the area along a branched stream; sometimes a specific reference to the point where the stream forks; less often a reference to a fork in a roadway: Boiling Fork.

A fork in the data path of an image processing pipeline, allowing a single stream of data to branch into parallel paths for simultaneous processing.

A fork is what occurs when two (or more) versions of a software package's source code are being developed in parallel which once shared a common code base, and these multiple versions of the source code have irreconcilable differences between them. This should not be confused with a development branch, which may later be folded back into the original source code base. (Taken from the New Hacker's Dictionary) More information can be found in: Compare with branching The fork entity in the New Hacker's Dictionary Freshmeat Freshmeat maintains the Web's largest index of Unix and cross-platform open source software. More information can be found in: Freshmeat

the act of branching out or dividing into branches

a part of a forked or branching shape; "he broke off one of the branches"; "they took the south fork"

divide into two or more branches so as to form a fork; "The road forks"

a number of branches that have a common left node

the point at which a stream branches or parts

a branch of a canyon or valley FRKU