We introduce a new distribution, so called A new generalized modified Weibull (NGMW) distribution. Various structural properties of the distribution are obtained in terms of Meijer’s G–function, such as moments, moment generating function, conditional moments, mean deviations, order statistics and maximum likelihood estimators. The distribution exhibits a wide range of shapes with varying skewness and assumes all possible forms of hazard rate function. The NGMW distribution along with other distributions are fitted to two sets of data, arising in hydrology and in reliability. It is shown that the proposed distribution has a superior performance among the compared distributions as evidenced via goodness–of–fit tests.