expectation

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun The act of expecting.
• noun Eager anticipation.
• noun The state of being expected.
• noun Something expected.
• noun Prospects, especially of success or gain.
• noun The expected value of a random variable.
• noun The mean of a random variable.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun The act or state of waiting or awaiting with confident anticipation.
• noun The act or state of expecting; a looking forward to an event as about to happen; belief in the occurrence of something hereafter.
• noun That which is expected; what is anticipated or looked forward to.
• noun Prospect of future good, as of possessions, honors, advancement, and the like: usually in the plural.
• noun A state or qualities in a person which excite anticipation in others of some future excellence; promise.
• noun In medicine, same as expectant method (which see, under expectant).
• noun In the theory of probabilities, the present value of contingent future gain. It is equal to the value to be gained multiplied by the probability of gaining it. No account is taken of interest, as not being germane to the problems usually treated.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• noun The act or state of expecting or looking forward to an event as about to happen.
• noun That which is expected or looked for.
• noun The prospect of the future; grounds upon which something excellent is expected to happen; prospect of anything good to come, esp. of property or rank.
• noun The value of any chance (as the prospect of prize or property) which depends upon some contingent event. Expectations are computed for or against the occurrence of the event.
• noun (Med.) The leaving of the disease principally to the efforts of nature to effect a cure.
• noun the mean or average duration of the life individuals after any specified age.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun The act or state of expecting or looking forward to an event as about to happen.
• noun That which is expected or looked for.
• noun The prospect of the future; grounds upon which something excellent is expected to occur; prospect of anything good to come, especially of property or rank.
• noun The value of any chance (as the prospect of prize or property) which depends upon some contingent event.
• noun statistics The first moment; the long-run average value of a variable over many independent repetitions of an experiment.
• noun colloquial statistics the arithmetic mean
• noun medicine (rare) The leaving of a disease principally to the efforts of nature to effect a cure.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun anticipating with confidence of fulfillment
• noun belief about (or mental picture of) the future
• noun the feeling that something is about to happen
• noun the sum of the values of a random variable divided by the number of values