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say it: PREV-uh-luhns
prevalence is a noun meaning "the quality of prevailing generally; being widespread". It carries 3 recorded senses.
the quality of prevailing generally; being widespread
“he was surprised by the prevalence of optimism about the future”
(epidemiology) the ratio (for a given time period) of the number of occurrences of a disease or event to the number of units at risk in the population
epidemiology
a superiority in numbers or amount
“a preponderance of evidence against the defendant”
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 prevalence 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.