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

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.