distribution

Noun

distribution (countable and uncountable, plural distributions)

1. An act of distributing or state of being distributed.
2. An apportionment by law (of funds, property).
3. The process by which goods get to final consumers over a geographical market, including storing, selling, shipping and advertising.
4. Anything distributed; portion; share.
   • December 6, 1709, Francis Atterbury, a sermon preach'd before the sons of the clergy at their anniversary-meeting in the Church of St. Paul
     our charitable distributions
5. The result of distributing; arrangement.
   • A group of Thai researchers found the spider during an expedition to Phang-Nga province in southern Thailand to research the diversity and distribution of tarantulas in the country.2023 September 26, Hafsa Khalil, “Electric blue tarantula species discovered in Thailand”, in CNN, archived from the original on 20 Nov 2024
   • To specify the effect of flutter with one figure can be extremely misleading, for it says nothing about the distribution of flutter in the spectrum of interest.1979, J. Strackee, Robert S. Reneman, editor, Data in Medicine: Collection, Processing and Presentation: A Physical-Technical Introduction for Physicians and Biologists, Springer Netherlands, page 200
6. The total number of something sold or delivered to the clients.
   • The distribution of my little rock magazine is about 3,000.
7. The frequency of occurrence or extent of existence.
8. The apportionment of income or wealth in a population.
   • The wealth distribution became extremely skewed in the kleptocracy.
9. The way in which a player's hand is divided in suits, or in which a particular suit is divided between the players.
   • The declarer had 3-6-2-2 distribution.
10. A probability distribution; the set of relative likelihoods that a variable will have a value in a given interval.
    • In fact, NALP has been at the forefront of educating prospective lawyers on the dangers of focusing on “average” starting salaries. The average is meaningless. The median is just slightly more helpful, and NALP has been begging people to pay attention to the bimodal salary distribution curve that...2010 July 23, Elie Mystal, “NALP Gives More Information on Expected Lawyer Salary”, in Above the Law, archived from the original on 15 Oct 2023
    • The criterion for positivity was determined for each antigen of each species applying a mixture model to the PP data which assumed two inherent Gaussian distributions: a narrow distribution or seronegatives, and a broader distribution of seropositives.2015 September 11, “Hotspots of Malaria Transmission in the Peruvian Amazon: Rapid Assessment through a Parasitological and Serological Survey”, in PLOS ONE, →DOI, archived from the original on 12...
11. (differential geometry) A subset of the tangent bundle of a manifold that satisfies certain properties; used to construct the notions of integrability and foliation of a manifold.
12. A set of bundled software components.
    • a Linux distribution

    Synonyms:

    distro