Normal

About

Normal is a word with a wide variety of meanings that depend heavily on context, including the following:

1. (adj., general) conforming to a common standard, type, pattern, or range; usual, familiar, typical

• "normal occurrence", "normal behavior", "normal intelligence"

2. (adj., psychology) free from mental disorder; sane

3. (adj., statistics) relating to a normal distribution

4. (adj., chemistry) (several very specific definitions about chemical composition and molecular structures and interactions)

5. (adj., geometry) something that is perpendicular to something else

6. (adj., set theory) "having the property that every coset produced by operating on the left by a given element is equal to the coset produced by operating on the right by the same element" (m-w.com)

7. (adj., matrix algebra) "having the property of commutativity under multiplication by the transpose of the matrix, each of whose elements is a conjugate complex number with respect to the corresponding element of the given matrix" (m-w.com)

Pages

• /ambiguity: In social contexts, different definitions of "normal" are often conflated in order to prescribe behavior (hypernormalization).

Links

Reference

• Wikipedia (disambiguation page)
• Wiktionary
• Dictionary.com
• Merriam-Webster