Distillation is a process of separating liquids by heating them until they turn to vapor, then cooling the vapor back into liquid. The key is that different liquids boil at different temperatures, so you can separate them one at a time.

Here's how it works: imagine you have salty ocean water and you want pure drinking water. If you heat the mixture, the water boils and turns to steam at 212°F, but the salt stays behind because it doesn't boil at that temperature. Collect that steam in a cool tube, and it condenses back into pure water, leaving the salt in the original container. Scientists use distillation to separate chemicals in laboratories.

The word also means extracting the most important parts of something, like when you distill a long book into a short summary. You're taking out the essential ideas and leaving behind the less important details. A teacher might ask you to distill your five-page report down to one paragraph that captures the main points. In both meanings, distillation is about separating and keeping what matters most.