It's Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for August 1st.
Today's word is dissociate, spelled D-I-S-S-O-C-I-A-T-E.
Dissociate is a verb.
To dissociate is to separate oneself from association or union with someone or something.
In contexts relating to psychology,
it has to do specifically with mentally detaching from one's physical or emotional experiences.
In chemistry, dissociate means to separate a chemical compound into its constituent parts,
especially through the application of heat or a solvent.
Here's the word used in a sentence from the Brown Daily Herald.
Last spring, Sunrise Brown launched their D.I.R.E. campaign,
which stands for Dissociate and Reinvest,
calling on the university to dissociate from the fossil fuel industry and prioritize issues of environmental justice in its relationships with the Providence community.
The word dissociate and its synonymous sibling disassociate can each mean to separate from association or union with another.
Both trace back to the Latin verb sociare, meaning to join,
which comes in turn from socius, a noun meaning companion.
Socius is associated with many English words, including social and society.
Dis in this case means do the opposite of,
so both dissociate and disassociate indicate severing that which is united.
Some argue that disassociate is illogical
because it indicates separating and uniting simultaneously.