• Average

    Pronunciation

    • US enPR: ăvʹərÄ­j, enPR: ăvʹrÄ­j, IPA: /ˈævəɹɪdÊ’/, /ˈævɹɪdÊ’/

    Origin

    From Old French avarie, from Old Italian avaria (which possibly from Arabic عوارية (ʕawārīya, "damaged goods"), from عوار (ʕawār, "fault, blemish, defect, flaw"), from عور (ʕáwira, "to lose an eye")).

    Full definition of average

    Noun

    average

    (plural averages)
    1. (legal, marine) Financial loss due to damage to transported goods; compensation for damage or loss. From 15th C.
      • 2008, Filiberto Agusti, Beverley Earle, Richard Schaffer, Filiberto Agusti, Beverley Earle, International Business Law and Its Environment, page 219,Historically, the courts have allowed a general average claim only where the loss occurred as a result of the ship being in immediate peril....The court awarded the carrier the general average claim. It noted that “a ship′s master should not be discouraged from taking timely action to avert a disaster,” and need not be in actual peril to claim general average.
    2. Customs duty or similar charge payable on transported goods.
    3. Proportional or equitable distribution of financial expense.
    4. (mathematics) The arithmetic mean.
      • 2013-06-01, Towards the end of poverty, But poverty’s scourge is fiercest below $1.25 (the average of the 15 poorest countries’ own poverty lines, measured in 2005 dollars and adjusted for differences in purchasing power): people below that level live lives that are poor, nasty, brutish and short.
    5. The average of 10, 20 and 24 is (10 + 20 + 24)/3 = 18.
    6. (statistics) Any measure of central tendency, especially any mean, the median, or the mode.
    7. (sports) An indication of a player's ability calculated from his scoring record, etc.
      batting average
    8. (UK, legal, obsolete) The service that a tenant owed his lord, to be done by the animals of the tenant, such as the transportation of wheat, turf, etc.
    9. (UK, in the plural) In the corn trade, the medial price of the several kinds of grain in the principal corn markets.

    Usage notes

    (mathematics, statistics) The term average may refer to the statistical mean, median or mode of a batch, sample, or distribution, or sometimes any other measure of central tendency. Statisticians and responsible news sources are careful to use whichever of these specific terms is appropriate. In common usage, average refers to the arithmetic mean. It is, however, a common rhetorical trick to call the most favorable of mean, median and mode the "average" depending on the interpretation of a set of figures that the speaker or writer wants to promote.

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    terms derived from average (noun)

    Adjective

    average

    1. (not comparable) Constituting or relating to the average.The average age of the participants was 18.5.
    2. Neither very good nor very bad; rated somewhere in the middle of all others in the same category.I soon found I was only an average chess player.
    3. Typical.
    4. The average family will not need the more expensive features of this product.
    5. (informal) Not outstanding, not good, banal; bad or poor.

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    Verb

    1. (transitive, informal) To compute the arithmetic mean of.If you average 10, 20 and 24, you get 18.
    2. Over a period of time or across members of a population, to have or generate a mean value of.The daily high temperature last month averaged 15°C.
    3. To divide among a number, according to a given proportion.to average a loss

    Derived terms

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