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 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.
  • noun A rule; a pattern; a model; an authoritative standard.
  • noun In biology, a typical structural unit; a type.
  • noun An abbreviation of Norman.

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.

  • 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:
  • verb analysis To endow (a vector space, etc) with a norm.

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

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

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Back-formation from normed.

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