# distribution

Pronunciation: say "dis-truh-BYOO-shuhn" /ˌdɪstɹəˈbjuːʃən/

## Noun

1. The act of handing something out or spreading it among people or places, or the state of being spread in that way.
   - Simple: The act of giving something out to many people, or the way something is spread out.
   - _The charity oversees the distribution of medical supplies to rural clinics._
   - _Distribution of the new textbooks will begin as soon as the shipment arrives._
2. The process of getting goods from producers to final consumers across a market, including storage, shipping, selling, and advertising.
   - Simple: The work of moving products from the company that makes them to the people who buy them.
   - _After the merger, the firm took over distribution for both brands in North America._
   - _Poor distribution kept the product off shelves in smaller towns._
3. The way something is spread out or arranged over an area, a range or a group; the pattern in which it occurs.
   - Simple: The way things are spread out over a place or among a group.
   - _The architect studied the distribution of windows along the facade._
   - _An uneven distribution of weight made the canoe tip to one side._
4. The way income or wealth is apportioned among the members of a population.
   - Simple: The way money and wealth are divided among the people in a country or group.
   - _Economists debate whether tax policy can meaningfully change the distribution of income._
   - _The country's wealth distribution grew more concentrated over the decade._
5. The set of relative likelihoods that a variable will take a value within any given interval.
   - Simple: In math, a description of how likely each possible value of something is.
   - _Heights in the population follow a roughly normal distribution._
   - _The distribution of waiting times at the clinic was skewed: most patients were seen quickly, but a few waited for hours._
6. A set of software components bundled and released together, such as an operating system built around the Linux kernel.
   - Simple: A collection of computer programs that are packaged and released together, such as a version of Linux.
   - _Debian is a long-running distribution maintained by a community of volunteers._
   - _Each distribution bundles the same core system with its own selection of tools and default settings._
7. Something handed out as a portion or share; an allotment received.
   - Simple: An amount that is given out to someone as their share.
   - _Shareholders received their quarterly distribution in early January._
   - _Her quarterly distribution from the family trust was smaller than she had expected._
8. An apportionment of funds or property carried out under legal authority, as in settling an estate or a bankruptcy.
   - Simple: The dividing of money or property among people, done under the rules of the law.
   - _The will called for an equal distribution of the estate among the four heirs._
   - _Creditors received a partial distribution from the bankrupt company's remaining assets._
9. The total number of units of something sold or delivered to clients or customers.
   - Simple: The total amount of something that a company sells or sends to its customers.
   - _With a distribution of two million copies, the paper dominated the regional market._
   - _The weekly newsletter now has a distribution of more than eighty thousand copies, most of them mailed to subscribers overseas._
10. The process or result of selling securities, especially placing them with investors who intend to hold them as long-term investments.
   - Simple: The selling of stocks or bonds, especially to people who plan to keep them for a long time.
   - _The underwriters managed the distribution of the IPO shares among institutional buyers._
   - _A successful distribution leaves most of the issue in the hands of long-term holders rather than short-term traders._
11. The way a player's hand is divided among the suits, or the way the cards of one suit are divided among the players.
   - Simple: How the cards in a hand are split among the suits, or how one suit is split among the players.
   - _A 4-4-3-2 distribution is the most common shape for a bridge hand._
   - _South guessed the distribution of the trump suit correctly and took the winning finesse._

## Other meanings

- (noun) The resolution or breaking down of a whole into its constituent parts.
- (noun) A rhetorical technique of dividing a subject into separate cases according to some property and addressing each case in turn.
- (noun) The process of sorting used type and returning each piece to its proper compartment in the type cases.
- (noun) The timed sequence of admission, cutoff, release, and compression that controls steam entering and leaving a steam engine's cylinder.
- (noun) In differential geometry, an assignment of a tangent subspace to each point of a manifold, subject to conditions such as smoothness, used to define integrability and foliations.

## Origin

Latin distribuere 'to distribute' joins dis- 'apart' and tribuere 'to give' (from tribus); its noun distributio reached English by way of Old French. Within English the word also reads as distribute + -ion.

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/distribution (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).