Meaning

• The act or state of expecting or looking forward to an event as about to happen.

• That which is expected or looked for.

• 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.

• The value of any chance (as the prospect of prize or property) which depends upon some contingent event.

• The first moment; the long-run average value of a variable over many independent repetitions of an experiment.

• (colloquial statistics) The arithmetic mean.

• The leaving of a disease principally to the efforts of nature to effect a cure.