generalization

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun The act or an instance of generalizing.
• noun A principle, statement, or idea having general application.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun The act of generalizing; recognition of a character as being common to two or more objects; also, the process of forming a general notion.
• noun Induction; an inference from the possession of a character by each individual or by some of the individuals of a class to its possession by all the individuals of that class; the observation that the known individuals of a species, or the known species of a genus, have a character in common, and the consequent attribution of that character to the whole class; also, a conclusion so reached.
• noun In mathematics, the process or result of modifying a proposition so as to obtain another having wider subject and predicate, but such that a limitation which, if applied to the new subject, gives the old subject, will reproduce the old predicate when applied to the new.
• noun Also spelled generalisation.
• noun In pathology, the involvement of the entire system in a morbid process which was at first local.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• noun The act or process of generalizing; the act of bringing individuals or particulars under a genus or class; deduction of a general principle from particulars.
• noun A general inference.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun American Alternative spelling of generalisation.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun reasoning from detailed facts to general principles
• noun the process of formulating general concepts by abstracting common properties of instances
• noun an idea or conclusion having general application
• noun (psychology) transfer of a response learned to one stimulus to a similar stimulus