Talk:Divide and conquer

Requested move 26 March 2025

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: moved. (closed by non-admin page mover) Frost 16:07, 3 April 2025 (UTC)

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Divide and rule → Divide and conquer – Far more common term relating to this subject, per WP:COMMONNAME. I doubt many users look up "Divide and rule" when looking for this article. PhoenixCaelestis • Talk • Contributions 13:34, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

• Support. While I see that "divide and rule" is the literal translation, and has some historical use, "divide and conquer" seems to have been the more common phrasing in English for a long time. While both are correct, I was only familiar with the expression as "divide and conquer", and I imagine most of our readers will either expect to find this under that title, or be equally familiar with both. That favours the move, and the current title will still go there. It also probably explains why this move has been proposed twice in the past; I gather that one of those discussions ended because there was already a disambiguation page at the proposed title, which has since been moved, and at that time the editors were confused or intimidated by the process of swapping multiple pages, as well as the challenge of improving what they felt was a messy article. The other discussion doesn't seem to have gone very far. I see no real objection to moving it now. P Aculeius (talk) 14:58, 26 March 2025 (UTC)
• Support per rationale of PhoenixCaelestis and P Aculeius. A. Randomdude0000 (talk) 15:32, 26 March 2025 (UTC)
• Support per all, although there may be an argument that Indian English differs from other varieties in this respect. Johnbod (talk) 16:51, 26 March 2025 (UTC)
• Support per all. Hyperbolick (talk) 00:25, 27 March 2025 (UTC)
• Support due to obvious frequency of use. --SergeWoodzing (talk) 12:43, 27 March 2025 (UTC)
• Support – Per nom. Yue🌙 20:43, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

Support: MW gives "divide and conquer" as the headword and "divide and rule" as a variant. ―Howard • 🌽³³ 20:26, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose as unnecessary. According to the Ngram, there is no great difference in frequency between the two variants. Cambridge dictionary (UK) has an entry on Divide and rule and gives a variant Divide and conquer (mainly US), which suggests that this is an issue between different English variants (WP:TITLEVAR). 84.251.164.143 (talk) 07:42, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

  As a further observation, most of the sources currently in the article use "divide and rule". Pages linking here also do not show preference for conquer in redirects (What links here, where 10 article pages link to Divide and conquer) or piping (Source links, where only 1/5 of the links are piped from conquer to rule). I admit that the latter is a biased measure, as the article name influences the links, but in clear cases, there is typically a lot of piping. 84.251.164.143 (talk) 11:08, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

  This is misleading. The phrase is clearly not an Americanism; it was used rather famously by Samuel Johnson in 1751 ("Divide and conquer, is a principle equally just in science as in policy." [emphasis in original]), and we find it quoted in 19th century treatises, reports, and parliamentary debates from around the English-speaking world. Neither the original OED nor Webster's 3rd have an entry under either title, presumably as the sense is already covered under "divide". The ngram supplied above is faulty, in that limiting it to 1950 and after gives the impression that "divide and conquer" has only recently become more common; but if you begin the ngram at 1800, as would normally be done to take in the period for which most English-language works scanned by Google are available, you'll see that "divide and conquer" was predominant for the entire period prior to World War I, while "divide and rule" was slightly more common during the interwar years, before "divide and conquer" again became more common in works published from 1939 to 1954, and much more common beginning in 1987. I knew this to be the case because I checked before posting my "support" above. Since it's not a variant between different dialects of English, it should be at the predominant form. P Aculeius (talk) 12:16, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

  In the Ngram, one can select the corpus. In American English corpus, conquer is 1.1–3 times more common. In British English it is the other way round: rule is 1.5–9 times more common between 1950–2024. I set starting point to 1950 simply because we usually base the considerations on modern usage. Other editors can judge whether the above is enough of an difference so that WP:ENGVAR is applicable. I think this at least demonstrates that "divide and rule" is not some obscure variant, like the earlier !votes seemed to imply. 84.251.164.143 (talk) 13:25, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

  Again, I wonder if Indian English is an issue here - they seem to use "rule" more, and the phrase is extremely common in Indian discussions of history and politics. Johnbod (talk) 16:20, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

  That's a good observation. How should we factor the Indian English into this discussion? Which way would it balance the scales? 84.251.164.143 (talk) 17:34, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

  The only South Asian English dictionary available to me is Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary South Asia Edition (2003), which only gives divide and rule under divide. ―Howard • 🌽³³ 21:51, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

References

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.