distillation

From Middle English distillacioun, from Anglo-Norman distillacioun, from Latin distīllātiōnem, accusative of distīllātiō.

• (UK) IPA^(key): /dɪstɪˈleɪʃən/

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• (US, Canada) IPA^(key): /ˌdɪstɪˈleɪʃən/

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• (General Australian) IPA^(key): /dɪstɪˈlæɪʃən/
• Rhymes: -eɪʃən

distillation (countable and uncountable, plural distillations)

1. The act of falling in drops, or the act of pouring out in drops.
2. That which falls in drops.
3. (chemistry, chemical engineering) The separation of more volatile parts of a substance from less volatile ones by evaporation and condensation.
   1. Purification through repeated or continuous distilling; rectification.
   2. (petrochemistry) Separation of petroleum into specific hydrocarbon groups; fractionation.
4. The substance extracted by distilling.
   • c. 1597 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Merry Wiues of Windsor”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act III, scene v], line 104:

     to be stopped in, like a strong distillation, with stinking / clothes that fretted in their own grease.

   • 1609, William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 5”, in Shake-speares Sonnets. […], London: By G[eorge] Eld for T[homas] T[horpe] and are to be sold by William Aspley, →OCLC:

     Then, were not summer's distillation left,
     A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass […]

5. (machine learning) The transformation of a complex large language model into a smaller one.
   • 2025 January 29, Cade Metz, “OpenAI Says DeepSeek May Have Improperly Harvested Its Data”, in The New York Times‎^[1], →ISSN:

     Distillation is often used to train new systems. If a company takes data from proprietary technology, the practice may be legally problematic. But it is often allowed by open source technologies.

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distillation f (plural distillations)

1. distillation

• “distillation”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.