dividend

dividend

1. Maths a number or quantity to be divided by another number or quantity

2. Law the proportion of an insolvent estate payable to the creditors

3. Finance

a. a distribution from the net profits of a company to its shareholders

b. a pro-rata portion of this distribution received by a shareholder

4. the share of a cooperative society's surplus allocated at the end of a period to members

5. Insurance a sum of money distributed from a company's net profits to the holders of certain policies

Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005

dividend

[′div·ə‚dend]

(mathematics)

A quantity which is divided by another quantity in the operation of division.

McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms, 6E, Copyright © 2003 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Dividend

 

the part of the profit made by a stockholding company that is distributed each year among the stockholders.

On the common shares the dividend is paid out in accordance with the amount of profit made by the corporation during a given year. On the preferred shares the size of the dividend is set beforehand in the form of a fixed percentage. With the growth of the share capital the total sum of the dividend also grows, and most of it goes to the large stockholders. The growth of dividends is one of the indicators of the increased income of the parasitic class of rentiers.

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.