Phrase guide

Student's t distribution

noun · 1 senses · updated from the 2026-07-25 local source snapshot

Definitions and examples are grouped by meaning. Pronunciation, history, word forms, translations, descendants, synonyms, antonyms, derived terms, and related words appear whenever the source provides them.

Sound

Pronunciation

Each Play button uses your device's default local English voice, or a natural local fallback. The selected voice name appears after playback. This is synthesized speech, not a source recording.

No pronunciation record was provided for this word.

1

noun

Meaning 1

A distribution that arises when the population standard deviation is unknown and has to be estimated from the data.

Definition source: English Wiktionary via Wiktextract

Topics: mathematics, sciences, statistics

No example sentence was provided for this meaning.

Meaning relationships

Synonyms: none provided

Antonyms: none provided

History

Etymology

From the pen-name of Irish statistician William Sealy Gosset, which he used for a 1908 paper in Biometrika, under the pseudonym Student. The distribution was popularised through the work of Ronald Fisher, who referred to it as Student's distribution and used the letter t to represent the test value.

Across languages

Translations

3 source translations are retained for this English entry.

  • Czech: Studentovo t-rozdělení — probability distribution
  • Finnish: t-jakauma — probability distribution
  • Finnish: Studentin t-jakauma — probability distribution