norm

Pluralnorms

1. 1
   nouncountable

   A rule imposed by regulations, or enforced socially by the members of a community.

   Like the invisible code of conduct a community polices among its own members.

   Punctuality quickly became a firm norm within the new management team.

   Communities enforce their norms through quiet pressure rather than formal punishment.

   Similarrule, convention, standard, custom, principle

   Note

   Where the "typical" meaning reports what people usually do, this one names what they are expected to do, whether a regulation or a community's disapproval does the enforcing. It travels most often in the plural with an adjective in front: social norms, societal norms. Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney's Willpower (2011) uses differing social norms to explain a habit as ordinary as not snacking between meals.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   What is normal or typical; the usual state of things.

   Remote meetings rapidly became the norm during the pandemic.

   In many offices, working from home a few days a week is now the norm.

   Similarstandard, rule, convention, custom

   Oppositeexception, anomaly

   Note

   The everyday sense, and the one most readers meet first. It goes back to Latin norma, a carpenter's square, so the usual state of things was once pictured as whatever is true to the tool. It nearly always takes the definite article, the norm, and often stands opposite the exception: good work "must become the norm, not the exception." Calling something the norm describes it; it does not approve it.

3. 3
   nouncountable

   In mathematics, a real-valued function on a vector space, usually written ‖v‖ or |v|, that meets a set of formal conditions designed to generalize a vector's length.

   Every inner product on a vector space induces a norm, but not every norm comes from an inner product.

   Many machine-learning models add a penalty based on the norm of the weight vector to keep the weights small.

   Note

   What makes a function a norm is that it keeps the habits of length: only the zero vector can have norm zero, scaling a vector by k scales its norm by the absolute value of k, and the norm of a sum never exceeds the sum of the norms. That last rule is the triangle inequality. The double bars earn their keep in ‖kv‖ = |k|·‖v‖, where single bars already mean absolute value.

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