Average

How to spell average

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce average

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does average mean?

1. nounA value found by adding several quantities together and dividing by how many there are; the typical amount.
2. adjectiveOrdinary or typical; neither very good nor very bad.
3. verbTo amount to a particular figure as a mean over time, or to calculate that mean.

Average in a sentence

• noun

  The average of the three test scores came to seventy-one.

• adjective

  His coursework was about average for the whole class.

• verb

  The company profits tend to average around five percent each year.

• noun

  House prices in the city rose well above the national average.

• adjective

  The cafe served an average lunch at a surprisingly high price.

• verb

  His shifts usually average about nine hours.

Where does average come from?

Language of origin: Arabic

Average began as a commercial and maritime term, not a mathematical one. It traces back to the Arabic word ʿawār, meaning 'damage' or 'a defect in goods', which passed into the Mediterranean trading languages as Italian avaria and Old French avarie, both describing damage suffered by a ship or its cargo at sea. When such loss occurred, the cost was shared proportionally among everyone with a financial stake in the voyage, and this idea of dividing a loss equally across many parties is what gave the word its modern numerical heart. By the 1700s English speakers had generalised that sense of an evenly distributed amount into the arithmetic mean we know today. The unstressed middle vowel, the soft 'e' in the heart of aver-A-ge, is the spelling trap, since it is barely sounded and is easily dropped to give the common misspelling 'avrage'.

How the word is built

• averag- (from French avarie: damage to ship or cargo, shared loss)
• -e