population

The complete set of all people in a country, or a town, or any region (or just the number of such people). By extension the term is used for the complete set of objects of interest; for example, all cars built by a particular company in the year 2001, all apples sold as Grade I by a particular supermarket, all students in a university, all smokers. These are all real populations and are finite, though they may be large. The term is also used for the infinite population of all possible results of a sequence of statistical trials; for example, tossing a coin.