Of course the literal meaning of "normalisation" is to make more "normal", and that can mean almost anything at all. Even the Wikipedia article you linked to st

Of course the literal meaning of "normalisation" is to make more "normal", and that can mean almost anything at all. Even the Wikipedia article you linked to starts with "normalization can have a range of meanings". If you have heard that word most used with one meaning and I have heard it most used with another meaning then that doesn't invalidate either of those definitions. The Wikipedia article you linked to gives two very broad definitions in the lead. The definition covered in the first paragraph is "adjusting values measured on different scales to a notionally common scale", which seems to be what you're talking about. The definition covered in the second paragraph is "the creation of shifted and scaled versions of statistics", in particular "some types of normalization involve only a rescaling, to arrive at values relative to some size variable". I'm not comfortable with the use of "of statistics" in that second definition: the very first example is in the article standard score [1], which is about a rescaled element of the population, not a rescaled statistic. In any case, outside of statistics, a rescaling is a common meaning for this word, and a rescaled statistic is clearly just a special case of this. I think it was clear from the context that we were talking about this meaning originally. By far the most common case of this is a linear rescaling (including translation) to [0,1] but I was already up front that this is just a special case. As for your sigmoid comment, I may have misunderstood but it sounds like you're saying that if you have a variable in the range in [0,1] then it can be described as the result of a sigmoid function. My objection to this is the same as my original objection to calling such as variable "normalised": it is a confusing variable name to use unless you actually did get it by applying a sigmoid function to something, not just because it holds a value that could hypothetically be obtained from a sigmoid function (but you didn't). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_score https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_score