distribution
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
12 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "distribution", 12-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Hunspell error dictionaries, and usage frequency ranked against the top 100,000 English words in the Wordfreq corpus. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "distribution" includes synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and cross-language translation pointers sourced from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org extract. Whether you are verifying the correct spelling of "distribution" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
distribution is aEnglishnoun. It means: An act of distributing or state of being distributed. Pronounced /ˌdɪstɹəˈbjuːʃən/. It ranks #2,290 in English word frequency. Often confused with distributor and distributive.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | distribution |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˌdɪstɹəˈbjuːʃən/ |
| Letters | 12 |
| Frequency rank | #2,290 |
| Misspellings tracked | 19 |
| Confusable pairs | 3 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for distribution is 12 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˌdɪstɹəˈbjuːʃən/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,290 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 17 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 19 documented wrong-spelling variants for distribution, with forms such as "ddistribution", "disrtibution", and "disstribution". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 3 confusable-pair relationships, "distributor", "distributive", "distributing", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Old French, from Latin distributio, from distribuere 'to distribute', itself from dis- 'apart' + tribuere 'to' (from tribus). By surface analysis, distribute + -ion. Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is distribution, spelled D-I-S-T-R-I-B-U-T-I-O-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1An act of distributing or state of being distributed.
- 2An apportionment by law (of funds, property).
- 3The process by which goods get to final consumers over a geographical market, including storing, selling, shipping and advertising.
- 4Anything distributed; portion; share.
- 5The result of distributing; arrangement.
- 6The total number of something sold or delivered to the clients.
- 7The frequency of occurrence or extent of existence.
- 8The apportionment of income or wealth in a population.
- 9The way in which a player's hand is divided in suits, or in which a particular suit is divided between the players.
- 10A probability distribution; the set of relative likelihoods that a variable will have a value in a given interval.
- 11A subset of the tangent bundle of a manifold that satisfies certain properties; used to construct the notions of integrability and foliation of a manifold.
- 12A set of bundled software components.
- 13The process or result of the sale of securities, especially their placement among investors with long-term investment strategies.
- 14The resolution of a whole into its parts.
- 15The process of sorting the types and placing them in their proper boxes in the cases.
- 16The steps or operations by which steam is supplied to and withdrawn from the cylinder at each stroke of the piston: admission, suppression or cutting off, release or exhaust, and compression of exhaust steam prior to the next admission.
- 17A rhetorical technique in which a subject is divided into multiple cases based on some property or properties, and each case is addressed individually.
Etymology
From Old French, from Latin distributio, from distribuere 'to distribute', itself from dis- 'apart' + tribuere 'to' (from tribus). By surface analysis, distribute + -ion.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: ddistribution,disrtibution,disstribution,distirbution,distrbiution,distribbution,distribtuion,distribuiton,distribusion,distributino,distributionn,distributoin,distributtion,distriubtion,distrribution,disttribution,ditsribution,dsitribution,idstribution
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for distribution
Misspelling Variants of "distribution"
Frequency rank: #2,290 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter D in our English index: