distribution

Meaning

Noun

• An act of distributing or state of being distributed.
• An apportionment by law (of funds, property).
• The process by which goods get to final consumers over a geographical market, including storing, selling, shipping and advertising.
• Anything distributed; portion; share.
• The result of distributing; arrangement.
• The total number of something sold or delivered to the clients.
• The frequency of occurrence or extent of existence.
• The apportionment of income or wealth in a population.
• The way in which a player's hand is divided in suits, or in which a particular suit is divided between the players.
• A probability distribution; the set of relative likelihoods that a variable will have a value in a given interval.
• 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.
• A set of bundled software components; distro.
• The process or result of the sale of securities, especially their placement among investors with long-term investment strategies.
• The resolution of a whole into its parts.
• The process of sorting the types and placing them in their proper boxes in the cases.
• The steps or operations by which steam is supplied to and withdrawn from the cylinder at each stroke of the piston: admission, suppression or cutting off, release or exhaust, and compression of exhaust steam prior to the next admission.
• A rhetorical technique in which a subject is divided into multiple cases based on some property or properties, and each case is addressed individually.

Origin

• From Old French, from Latin distributio, from distribuere 'to distribute', itself from dis- 'apart' + tribuere 'to' (from tribus).