Cleave is one of the few english words that is its own antonym; I suppose this is because traversing a cleft distally splits, and proximally joins.

Other cultures built their divisions around different partitions: traditional indo-europeans like tripartite (m/f/n) and chinese like five-fold and I suppose someone out there is going to insist on somehow approximating e-fold, but as we're computer hackers, binary is a good default for splitting and joining.

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DH76CZbqoqI