How to Use normal distribution in a Sentence

normal distribution

noun
  • In a normal distribution that's the ~2% tail at the ends.
    Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 12 Jan. 2011
  • Pick something like a normal distribution for step sizes and see if this same stuff works.
    Adam Rogers, WIRED, 10 Apr. 2018
  • Picture a bell curve—the graph that illustrates a normal distribution, with most of the data congregating at the center, with long tails at the high and low ends.
    Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics, 14 June 2021
  • There are many naturally arising normal distributions, like the birth weight of babies and the amount of milk that cows produce.
    Eugenia Cheng, WSJ, 19 June 2019
  • One consequence of this is that the normal distribution, or bell curve, which says Black Swan events are highly unlikely to happen, no longer holds true.
    Jemma Green, Forbes, 4 Aug. 2022
  • The question is not whether a sum of small, independent values would be likely to follow a normal distribution.
    Jessica Riskin, The New York Review of Books, 21 Apr. 2022
  • On a graph, a normal distribution of the likely rise in temperature would look like a hump: a low tail at the left (unlikely), leading to a high hump in the middle (most likely), and a low tail on the right (unlikely).
    Gilbert E. Metcalf, Scientific American, 19 May 2020
  • Launching in Singapore and getting to 12 countries would be the normal distribution area for Pixel phones.
    Ron Amadeo, Ars Technica, 3 Feb. 2022
  • But this is no longer the case: Instead of a normal distribution, now the distribution of voters is more barbelled, with a hollow center and the center of gravity for each party far from the center of the other.
    Noah Millman, The Week, 12 Oct. 2021
  • For a normal distribution, 1 standard deviation above the mean should include 34.1 percent of the values.
    Rhett Allain, WIRED, 23 Dec. 2022
  • As seen in the NASA illustration below of a normal distribution of temperatures, or bell curve, as the average temperature of the planet warms, the curve shifts right.
    Jeff Berardelli, CBS News, 14 June 2021
  • Thinking back to statistics class, remember the normal distribution curve where most people scored in the middle and there were some outliers who performed really badly and others who excelled and got more than 98%?
    Nida Leardprasopsuk, Forbes, 13 Oct. 2021
  • The most famous statistical pattern of all is the normal distribution, which takes the shape of a bell curve and describes the statistical distribution of a wide range of uncorrelated events (like heights in a population or scores on the SAT).
    Quanta Magazine, 6 May 2019
  • Do this for all images in the data set, and an initial complex distribution of dots in million-dimensional space (which cannot be described and sampled from easily) turns into a simple, normal distribution of dots around the origin.
    Anil Ananthaswamy, Quanta Magazine, 5 Jan. 2023
  • Buying up the supplies and bestowing a vaccine monopoly on state governments blocked the normal distribution channels that connect producers with vaccinators.
    Star Tribune, 6 Jan. 2021
  • This implies that variation in phenotype is controlled by variation across many genes, and, that the variation itself exhibits gradual continuity (a continuity which can be modeled as a normal distribution of values).
    Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 9 Jan. 2011
  • As Scott and his colleagues noted in their paper, if a pathogen grows exponentially and a population receives a statistically normal distribution of exposures to it, then a lognormal distribution of incubation times should result.
    Quanta Magazine, 1 Mar. 2018
  • Philadelphia’s income distribution is remarkably similar to that of small Pennsylvania towns, which if anything are closer to a statistically normal distribution.
    Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, WSJ, 26 Dec. 2018

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'normal distribution.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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