distributed

1. 1
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of distribute.

   Volunteers distributed warm meals throughout the camp.

   The profits were distributed equally among the partners.

   Note

   One spelling does two jobs. It is the plain past (volunteers distributed meals) and the participle behind perfect and passive verbs (had distributed, were distributed). Every use of distribute takes a direct object, so the passive comes easily: profits are distributed among partners, leaflets to a crowd. When the participle settles into describing a state rather than an action, it becomes the "spread out" adjective.

2. 2
   adjective

   Spread out across a relatively wide area rather than concentrated in a single spot.

   The bird's nesting sites are widely distributed along the coastline.

   Surveyors mapped the distributed mineral deposits scattered through the valley.

   Similarscattered, dispersed

   Oppositeconcentrated, clustered

   Note

   A gradable adjective: one population can be more distributed than another, or the most distributed of all. It reaches beyond geography to people and work. Jessica Wildman and Richard Griffith's Leading Global Teams (2014) sets distributed teammates against local ones, meaning colleagues spread across sites rather than gathered in one office. After a verb it usually takes an adverb, as in widely, evenly or thinly distributed.

3. 3
   adjective

   Involving many separate computers or systems working together, rather than relying on a single central machine.

   The company moved its database to a distributed architecture spanning three data centers.

   A blockchain relies on a distributed ledger maintained by thousands of independent nodes.

   Similardecentralized

   Oppositecentralized

   Note

   A computing term that almost always sits before a noun, in fixed pairings such as distributed computing and distributed ray tracing. Its natural opposite is centralized: the work or data is spread over many separate units instead of resting on one. Those units may be processes or components as well as whole computers. It is the "spread out" sense carried into technical vocabulary.

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