In this paper, some properties of gamma-X family are discussed and a member of the family, the gamma-normal distribution, is studied in detail. The limiting behaviors, moments, mean deviations, dispersion, and Shannon entropy for the gamma-normal distribution are provided. Bounds for the non-central moments are obtained. The method of maximum likelihood estimation is proposed for estimating the parameters of the gamma-normal distribution. Two real data sets are used to illustrate the applications of the gamma-normal distribution. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.