1. The act or process of deriving. 2. a custom of recent derivation. 3. Something derived; a derivative. 4. The form or source from which something is derived; an origin. 5. The historical origin and development of a word; an etymology. 6. 7. A linguistic description of the process of word formation. 8. A logical or mathematical process indicating through a sequence of statements that a result such as a theorem or a formula necessarily follows from the initial assumptions.
