generalised

Generalised is the British English spelling of the word that in American English is written generalized. It can function as a past tense and past participle of the verb generalise, or as an adjective indicating something made more general or applicable to a wider class. The related nouns are generalisation (British) and generalization (American), referring to the act or process of making something more general, or to a result that applies beyond a specific case.

The core idea behind generalisation is extending scope or applicability. In language, to generalise means to form a broader rule from particular instances. In science and mathematics, generalisation often denotes moving from a special case to a broader framework, or from a concrete example to a more abstract concept. This can involve replacing specific assumptions with more universal ones, or identifying common structures across diverse situations.

In technical fields, generalised is used in several standard terms. In statistics and data analysis, generalised or generalized linear models extend linear models to broader distributions of the dependent variable. In mathematical analysis, generalised functions (also called distributions in some contexts) extend the notion of functions to accommodate objects like the Dirac delta. Other examples include generalised coordinates in physics and generalised quantifiers in logic. While many terms are shared with American English, the British form generalised and its derivatives remain common in scholarly and formal writing in the UK and other Commonwealth countries.

See also: generalisation, generalization, generalised linear model.