distribution-n; 3 Senses

Sense Number 1: act of spreading

Commentary: DISTRIBUTION[+event] The act of spreading, scattering, or distributing. Can refer to both a one-time event and a regular activity or career.

Examples:
Printing the flyers wasn't difficult, but their distribution across campus took all day!
I supervise the distribution of Christmas bonuses among our employees.
I was the supervisor of the Distribution department.
The product had some interruptions in its distribution chain.
Poorly-executed distribution can really kill a new product.

Mappings:
WordNet 2.0 Sense Numbers: 3 4

Sense Number 2: state of being distributed

Commentary: The state of being spread out; the spatial property of being scattered over an area. Can also refer to the particular way that something is scattered (for example, the distribution of income).

Examples:
There's a wide distribution of singing talent in this chorus.
I'd say that Starbucks coffee shops have achieved a pretty good distribution across the country.
Our newspapers have a strong distribution on campus.
I wrote a paper on the current distribution of income in Canada.

Mappings:
WordNet 2.0 Sense Numbers: 2

Sense Number 3: arrangement of values

Commentary: An arrangement of values for a variable that describes the frequency of a value's occurrence. Only refers to statistical values.

Examples:
The test scores for the midterm fall into a classic Gaussian distribution.
I studied the types of statistical distributions that numbers can fall into.

Mappings:
WordNet 2.0 Sense Numbers: 1