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say it: pah-pyuh-LAY-shuhn
population is a noun meaning "the people who inhabit a territory or state". It carries 5 recorded senses.
the people who inhabit a territory or state
“the population seemed to be well fed and clothed”
a group of organisms of the same species inhabiting a given area
“they hired hunters to keep down the deer population”
(statistics) the entire aggregation of items from which samples can be drawn
“it is an estimate of the mean of the population”
statistics
the number of inhabitants (either the total number or the number of a particular race or class) in a given place (country or city etc.)
“people come and go, but the population of this town has remained approximately constant for the past decade”
“the African-American population of Salt Lake City has been increasing”
the act of populating (causing to live in a place)
“he deplored the population of colonies with convicted criminals”
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for population come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.