Bell curves, normal distributions and Gaussians

While it is much better to refer to such a curve as a ‘normal distribution' than as a ‘bell curve,' if you really want to fit into the Statistical NLP or pattern recognition communities, you should instead learn to refer to these functions as Gaussians, and to remark things like, ‘Maybe we could model that using 3 Gaussians' at appropriate moments.'

– Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing