The development of chiral separation methods became very important in recent years since it is known that the biological or pharmacological activities of compounds of biological or pharmaceutical interest is mostly restricted to one of the enantiomers. Starting in the late 1960s with classical column liquid chromatography and the first direct gc separation, subsequently methods for HPLC and TLC were developed. More recently, electromigration techniques such as capillary zone electrophoresis, capillary electrokinetic chromatography and capillary electrochromatography found application for chiral separation. A broad spectrum of chiral separation principles have been developed in the 1970s, 1980s and first half of the 1990s, in which mainly applications of these basic separation principles were published. Several thousand publications appeared in this field. Miniaturized systems such as micro‐chip capillary electrophoresis attracted increasing attention in recent years. On the other hand, preparative HPLC found access into industrial production of enantiopure drugs. This article gives an overview of the diversity of chiral separation principles and their mechanisms. Due to the nature of stereoselectivity, there will never exist a universal chiral separation method, the choice of the method always has to be adapted to the problem. However, a few predictions are possible. This article does list applications, beacuse of space constrainds.