argument vs parameter

argument

noun
  • A parameter at a function call; an actual parameter, as opposed to a formal parameter. 

  • An abstract or summary of the content of a literary work such as a book, a poem or a major section such as a chapter, included in the work before the content itself; (figuratively) the contents themselves. 

  • Any dispute, altercation, or collision. 

  • The independent variable of a function. 

  • A value, or a reference to a value, passed to a function. 

  • Any of the phrases that bears a syntactic connection to the verb of a clause. 

  • A fact or statement used to support a proposition; a reason. 

  • A process of reasoning; argumentation. 

  • The phase of a complex number. 

  • A quantity on which the calculation of another quantity depends. 

  • A verbal dispute; a quarrel. 

  • A series of propositions organized so that the final proposition is a conclusion which is intended to follow logically from the preceding propositions, which function as premises. 

parameter

noun
  • An actual value given to such a formal parameter. 

  • An input variable of a function definition, that gets an actual value (argument) at execution time. 

  • The ratio of the three crystallographic axes which determines the position of any plane. 

  • A characteristic or feature that distinguishes something from others. 

  • A variable that describes some system (material, object, event, etc.) or some aspect thereof. 

  • The fundamental axial ratio for a given species. 

  • A variable of a model that is trained by a machine learning algorithm. 

  • A value kept constant during an experiment, equation, calculation, or similar, but varied over other versions of the experiment, equation, calculation, etc. 

  • Any measured quantity of a statistical population that summarises or describes an aspect of the population. 

  • In the ellipse and hyperbola, a third proportional to any diameter and its conjugate, or in the parabola, to any abscissa and the corresponding ordinate. 

How often have the words argument and parameter occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )