Definition of "disperse" []

• To drive off or scatter in different directions: The police dispersed the crowd. (verb-transitive)
• To strew or distribute widely: The airplane dispersed the leaflets over the city. (verb-transitive)
• To cause to vanish or disappear. See Synonyms at scatter. (verb-transitive)
• To disseminate (knowledge, for example). (verb-transitive)
• To separate (light) into spectral rays. (verb-transitive)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "They include Brenna Bell, an Oregon-based attorney with the National Lawyers Guild, who claims she was arrested while trying to obey police orders to disperse from a peaceful demonstration."
• "With the last investigation, however, we have gone beyond the field of actual colloid chemistry, although the solution of a radioactive substance, e.g. polonium chloride, can naturally be called a disperse system, though more accurately it is molecular-disperse because the substance dissolved in the solvent occurs here as molecules, not as molecular aggregates, as is the case in a colloidal solution."
• "London cops have been given the power to "disperse" anyone under 16, gathered in groups of two or more, from almost all of central London, after 9PM."