Definitions

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

  • noun A pattern that is regarded as typical of something.
  • noun A standard or expectation that is established for a given enterprise or effort.
  • noun A pattern of behavior considered acceptable or proper by a social group.
  • noun An average.
  • noun The magnitude of a vector.
  • noun The modulus of a complex number.
  • transitive verb To establish or judge in reference to a norm.
  • transitive verb Mathematics To define a norm on (a space).

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun An abbreviation of Norman.
  • noun A rule; a pattern; a model; an authoritative standard.
  • noun In biology, a typical structural unit; a type.
  • noun In petrography, in the quantitative classification (see rock), the standard mineral composition of an igneous rock, that is, the chemical composition expressed in terms of standard minerals.

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

  • noun A rule or authoritative standard; a model; a type.
  • noun (Biol.) A typical, structural unit; a type.

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

  • verb analysis To endow (a vector space, etc) with a norm.
  • noun That which is regarded as normal or typical.
  • noun A rule that is enforced by members of a community.
  • noun philosophy, computer science A sentence with non-descriptive meaning, such as a command, permission, or prohibition.
  • noun mathematics A function, generally denoted or , that maps vectors to non-negative scalars and has the following properties:

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

  • noun a statistic describing the location of a distribution
  • noun a standard or model or pattern regarded as typical

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[French norme, from Old French, from Latin norma, carpenter's square, norm; see gnō- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Back-formation from normed.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Latin norma ("a carpenter's square, a rule, a pattern, a precept").

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word norm.

Examples

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.