Other forms: normals
Normal means the usual, expected way things are. A normal day, normal service, perfectly normal. It describes what is typical rather than what is good, though the two are easy to confuse.
That confusion matters, because normal applied to people carries weight it does not carry applied to weather. Normal behaviour is a fair description; a normal person is a judgement, and abnormal is a clinical word with a long unhappy history. In statistics, the normal distribution is a technical term with a precise definition — the bell curve — and nothing to do with approval. Note back to normal, which is one of the most used phrases in English after a disruption.
1adjectivenormalUsual, typical, or expected.
“It is normal to feel nervous the first time.”
2adjectiveworkingWorking or behaving as it should.
“The readings are all normal.”
3nounstateThe usual state of things.
“Things should be back to normal by Wednesday.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
normal is a state of being usual.
Also accepted in games: ordinary, usual
Latin normalis meant made according to a carpenter's square, from norma, the square itself. The word for a tool that tests whether a corner is true became the word for whatever conforms to a rule.
Proto-Indo-European
*ǵneh₃-
Latin
nōrmālis
English, today
normal
Built from
From Latin nōrmālis. From Latin normālis (“made according to a carpenter's square; later: according to a rule”), from nōrma (“carpenter's square”), of uncertain origin; a doublet of normale. The earliest meaning of the word in English was "perpendicular; forming a right angle" like something normālis (“made according to a carpenter's square”), but by Late Latin normālis had also come to mean "according to a rule", from which modern English senses of the word derive: in the 1800s, as people began to quantitatively study things like height, weight and blood pressure, the usual or most common values came to be called "normal", and by extension values regarded as healthy or desirable came to be called "normal" regardless of their usuality.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA