The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (30 December 2018):
balanced tree
An optimisation of a tree which aims to keep
equal numbers of items on each subtree of each node so as to
minimise the maximum path from the root to any leaf node.
As items are inserted and deleted, the tree is restructured to
keep the nodes balanced and the search paths uniform. Such an
algorithm is appropriate where the overheads of the
reorganisation on update are outweighed by the benefits of
faster search.
A B-tree is a kind of balanced tree that can have more
than two subtrees at each node (i.e. one that is not
restricted to being a binary tree).
(2000-01-10)