noun The act of applying something that is true of part of a group to the whole group.
- Her generalization from three bad meals was that the restaurant had poor service overall.
noun The process of forming a general idea by picking out the features that particular examples share.
- Children's generalization of the word dog begins when they see many different furry pets.
- Through generalization, the student noticed that all the triangles shared three sides and wrote a rule.
noun Reasoning that moves from specific facts toward a broader, general conclusion.
- Scientists rely on generalization to turn separate observations into a rule about nature.
- After testing ten samples, the scientist made a generalization about how the whole batch would behave.
- A good generalization needs plenty of evidence, so we collected data from many different classrooms.
noun A simplistic or exaggerated idea about what the people in a particular group are like.
- It is a generalization to say that all teenagers spend their time on their phones.
- Saying that people from big cities are rude is an unfair generalization.
- My teacher warned us that a generalization about any group rarely tells the full story.
