or even better example: "split in half" but "split into two halves" (despite being a bit tautological)... and books ngram seems to confirm:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=split+in+half%2C+split+in+two+halves%2Csplit+into+two+halves&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Csplit%20in%20half%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Csplit%20in%20two%20halves%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Csplit%20into%20two%20halves%3B%2Cc0