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from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• intransitive verb To tear or split apart or into pieces violently. synonym: tear.
• intransitive verb To tear (one's garments or hair) in anguish or rage.
• intransitive verb To pull away forcibly; wrest.
• intransitive verb To pull, split, or divide.
• intransitive verb To pierce or disturb with sound.
• intransitive verb To cause pain or distress to.
• intransitive verb To become torn or split; come apart.

from The Century Dictionary.

• An obsolete variant of ren.
• To separate into parts with force or sudden violence; tear asunder; split.
• To remove or pluck away with violence; tear away.
• Synonyms Rip, Tear, Rend, Split, Cleave, Fracture, Chop. In garments we rip along the line at which they were sewed; we tear the texture of the cloth; we say, “It is not torn; it is only ripped.” More broadly, rip, especially with up, stands for a cutting open or apart with a quick, deep stroke: as, to rip up a body or a sack of meal. Rend implies great force or violence. To split is primarily to divide lengthwise or by the grain: as, to split wood. Cleave may be a more dignified word for split, or it may express a cutting apart by a straight, heavy stroke. Fracture may represent the next degree beyond cracking, the lightest kind of breaking, leaving the parts in place: as, a fractured bone or plate of glass; or it may be a more formal word for break. To chop is to cut apart with a heavy stroke, which is generally across the grain or natural cleavage, or through the narrow dimension of the material: chopping wood is thus distinguished from splitting wood.
• To be or to become rent or torn; become disunited; split; part asunder.
• To cause separation, division, or strife.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• intransitive verb To be rent or torn; to become parted; to separate; to split.
• transitive verb To separate into parts with force or sudden violence; to tear asunder; to split; to burst
• transitive verb To part or tear off forcibly; to take away by force.
• transitive verb See under Rap, v. t., to snatch.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• verb transitive To separate into parts with force or sudden violence; to tear asunder; to split; to burst
• verb transitive To part or tear off forcibly; to take away by force.
• verb intransitive To be rent or torn; to become parted; to separate; to split.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• verb tear or be torn violently