Primary
Distance ○｜Definition｜1st｜20251122135352-00-⌔
Distance
Distance is a numerical or occasionally qualitative measurement of how far apart objects, points, people, or ideas are. In physics or everyday usage, distance may refer to a physical length or an estimation based on other criteria (e.g. “two counties over”). The term is also frequently used metaphorically1 to mean a measurement of the amount of difference between two similar objects (such as statistical distance between probability distributions or edit distance between strings of text) or a degree of separation (as exemplified by distance between people in a social network). Most such notions of distance, both physical and metaphorical, are formalized in mathematics using the notion of a metric space.
In the social sciences, distance can refer to a qualitative measurement of separation, such as social distance or psychological distance.
Printed 2026-06-28.
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Link to original Footnotes
Schnall, Simone (2014). “Are there basic metaphors?”. The power of metaphor: Examining its influence on social life. American Psychological Association. pp. 225–247. doi:10.1037/14278-010. ISBN 978-1-4338-1579-9. ↩
Secondary
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