distributive

/dɪˈstrɪbjətɪv/
adjective
  1. Relating to the act of giving or spreading something out among a group of people or places.
    • Farmers rely on distributive systems to get their crops to markets.
    • The company has a distributive network that reaches every major city.
    • The distributive phase of the project involves sending supplies to all the schools.
  2. In mathematics, describing a property where multiplication applied to a sum of numbers gives the same result as multiplying each addend separately and then adding the products.
    • The distributive property shows that 3 × (4 + 5) equals (3 × 4) + (3 × 5).
    • Using the distributive rule, you can simplify 2(x + 3) to 2x + 6.
    • Students learn the distributive law when they first study algebra.
Antonyms
noun
  1. A word or grammatical form that refers to each individual member of a group separately (e.g., 'each', 'every', 'either').
    • In the sentence 'Each student brought a book,' the word 'each' is a distributive.
    • Teachers explain that distributives are different from collective words like 'all' or 'some.'
    • Distributives like 'every' and 'neither' help specify individual items in a set.
What does "distributive" mean? | whatsthatwordmean | whatsthatwordmean