Distribution
Etymology
From Latin “distribuere” (to divide up, deal out), from dis- (apart) plus tribuere (to allot), which traces to “tribus” (tribe). The statistical sense keeps the idea of spreading values across their possible range.
noun · /dis-truh-BYOO-shuhn/
The full picture of how often each value occurs across a set of data.
What it names
It shifts attention from a single summary number to the whole shape, which is where the real story usually lives.
Example
Two towns can share an average wealth yet have utterly different distributions — one broadly middle-class, the other split between rich and poor.
Related idea
A summary like the mean compresses a distribution into one number and can hide its shape, including skew, multiple peaks, or fat tails a power law would produce.