distillation
nounUK /dɪstɪˈleɪʃən/ · CA, US /ˌdɪstɪˈleɪʃən/
Etymology From Middle English distillacioun, from Anglo-Norman distillacioun, from Latin distīllātiōnem, accusative of distīllātiō.
The act of falling in drops, or the act of pouring out in drops.
That which falls in drops.
› The separation of more volatile parts of a…
Chemistry, Natural sciences, Physical sciences Purification through repeated or continuous distilling; rectification.
Chemical engineering
Chemistry, Geography, Geology, Natural sciences, Petrochemistry, Petrology, Physical sciences Separation of petroleum into specific hydrocarbon groups; fractionation.
Chemical engineering
The substance extracted by distilling.
- to be stopped in, like a strong distillation, with stinking / clothes that fretted in their own grease.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:
- Then, were not summer's distillation left, A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass […]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:
The transformation of a complex large language model into a smaller one.
Machine learning
- 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.2025 January 29, Cade Metz, “OpenAI Says DeepSeek May Have Improperly Harvested Its Data”, in The New York Times, →ISSN:
- Anthropic says three Chinese firms used ‘distillation’ technique to extract information from its Claude chatbot[.]2026 February 23, “US AI giant accuses Chinese rivals of mass data theft”, in The Guardian, sourced from Agence France-Presse, →ISSN:
- Derived terms
- bidistillation, codistillation, cryodistillation, destructive distillation, distillation chaser, dry distillation, fractional distillation, freeze distillation, global distillation, hydrodistillation, membrane distillation, microdistillation, predistillation, redistillation, salt-effect distillation, steam distillation, vacuum distillation