The building blocks of English

Affixes

schiz(o)-

Divided or split.

Greek skhizein, to split.

The mental disorder schizophrenia (Greek phrēn, mind, so literally ‘split mind’) was called that because a part of the sufferer's psyche seems to be split off (the popular usage of schizophrenic for inconsistent attitudes is now regarded as misleading or offensive); a schizotype in psychiatry is a personality type in which mild symptoms of schizophrenia are present; somebody schizoid has a personality type characterized by emotional aloofness and solitary habits.

The form is used also in botany and biology: a schizocarp (Greek karpos, fruit) is a dry fruit that splits into single-seeded parts when ripe; schizogony (Greek ‑gonia, -begetting) is asexual reproduction by multiple fission in some protozoa; a schizont is a cell that divides by schizogony to form daughter cells.