divorce [LME] In early times divorce covered many ways of ending a marriage: one spouse could simply leave or send the other away; the marriage could be annulled, declared invalid from the beginning (as in the divorce of Henry VIII from Catherine of Aragon); or the couple could formally enter into a legal separation. The word itself is recorded from the late Middle Ages and came from Latin divortium, based on divertere ‘to turn in separate ways’. A divorced person has been a divorcee since the early 19th century. The term came from French, and at first usually appeared in its French forms, divorcée for a woman and divorcé for a man.