distribution

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. The act of distributing or the condition of being distributed; apportionment.
2. n. Something distributed; an allotment.
3. n. The act of dispersing or the condition of being dispersed; diffusion.
4. n. The geographic occurrence or range of an organism.
5. n. The geographic occurrence or range of a custom, usage, or other feature.
6. n. Division into categories; classification.
7. n. The process of marketing and supplying goods, especially to retailers.
8. n. A spatial or temporal array of objects or events: the distribution of theaters on Broadway.
9. n. Law The division of an estate or property among rightful heirs.
10. n. Statistics A set of numbers and their frequency of occurrence collected from measurements over a statistical population.
11. n. Mathematics A generalized function used in the study of partial differential equations.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. The act of dividing or parceling out; allotment in shares or according to requirement; apportionment; division among several: as, the distribution of an estate among the heirs; the distribution of justice or of alms; the distribution of parts in a play.
2. n. That which is distributed or apportioned.
3. n. The act or process of separating and arranging, or the special arrangement secured; separation into distinct order, parts, or classes; systematic or natural arrangement: as, the distribution of printing-types into their boxes (see distribute, II., 2); the distribution of plants into genera and species.
4. n. The act of spreading out as over a surface; in printing, the spreading of ink in an even film over the inking-rollers and the inking-table.
5. n. In rhetoric: Enumeration of several persons or things, with attribution to each of a special office, function, or characteristic.
6. n. The classification of the topics of a discourse by dividing them under different heads: now more commonly called division.
7. n. In logic: The distinguishing of a universal whole into its several kinds or species: thus differing from division, by which an integral whole is distinguished into its several parts.
8. n. The acceptation of a term in a general sense to apply to many individuals. This use of distributio appears in the early part of the thirteenth century. Petrus Hispanus says, “Distribution is a multiplication of a common term made by a universal sign; thus, when we say every man, the latter term is distributed or confounded by the sign every, so that there is a multiplication.”
9. n. In architecture, the arrangement of a plan with reference to walls and open spaces, or to the various services and uses to which the different apartments of an interior are destined; also, the artistic combination of masses, ornaments, wall-openings, various kinds of masonry, etc.—
10. n. In political economics, the division of the aggregate produce of the industry of any society among the independent individuals who compose it.—
11. n. In steam-engines, the operation by which steam is admitted into and withdrawn from the cylinder at each stroke of the piston.
12. n. Synonyms Apportionment, partition, division, disposition, grouping.

Wiktionary

1. n. An act of distributing or state of being distributed.
2. n. An apportionment by law (of funds, property).
3. n. business, marketing The process by which goods get to final consumers over a geographical market, including storing, selling, shipping and advertising.
4. n. The frequency of occurrence or extent of existence.
5. n. Anything distributed; portion; share
6. n. The result of distributing; arrangement.
7. n. mathematics, statistics A probability distribution; the set of relative likelihoods that a variable will have a value in a given interval.
8. n. computing A set of bundled software components; distro.
9. n. economics The apportionment of income or wealth in a population.
10. n. finance The process or result of the sale of securities, especially their placement among investors with long-term investment strategies.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. The act of distributing or dispensing; the act of dividing or apportioning among several or many; apportionment.
2. n. Separation into parts or classes; arrangement of anything into parts; disposition; classification.
3. n. That which is distributed.
4. n. (Logic) A resolving a whole into its parts.
5. n. (Print.) The sorting of types and placing them in their proper boxes in the cases.
6. n. (Steam Engine) The steps or operations by which steam is supplied to and withdrawn from the cylinder at each stroke of the piston; viz., admission, suppression or cutting off, release or exhaust, and compression of exhaust steam prior to the next admission.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. the act of distributing or spreading or apportioning
2. n. the commercial activity of transporting and selling goods from a producer to a consumer
3. n. the spatial or geographic property of being scattered about over a range, area, or volume
4. n. (statistics) an arrangement of values of a variable showing their observed or theoretical frequency of occurrence