Definition of "common denominator" []

• Mathematics A quantity into which all the denominators of a set of fractions may be divided without a remainder. (noun)
• A commonly shared theme or trait. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "As just one example: the environmentalist filmmaker Judith Helfand is making a film about a massive heat wave in Chicago in 1995 that killed about six hundred people.87 She explains that the greatest common denominator among the victims was that they were socially isolated."
• "It is in fact, the much-maligned and misunderstood discipline of alchemy that lay behind the often apparently bizarre decorations of the Gothic buildings as, indeed, it was alchemy that seemed to be the common denominator of the majority of the Grand Masters of the Priory of Sion29."
• "Vereby, A common denominator theory of alcohol and opiate dependence: review of similarities and differences, in H."