Median

How to spell median

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce median

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does median mean?

1. nounThe middle value in a set of numbers arranged in order, with half the values above it and half below.
2. adjectiveSituated in or relating to the middle of something.
3. nounThe strip of land that separates the opposing lanes of a divided road or motorway.

Median in a sentence

• noun

  The report listed the median household income for the region.

• adjective

  The median line of a triangle joins a vertex to the midpoint of the opposite side.

• noun

  The car skidded across the median and into oncoming traffic.

• noun

  To find the median, she sorted the figures and picked the central one.

• adjective

  The surgeon noted the median nerve running through the centre of the wrist.

• noun

  Wildflowers had been planted along the grassy median of the highway.

Where does median come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Median descends from the Latin medianus, meaning 'in the middle' or 'of the middle', which was formed from medius, the ordinary Latin word for 'middle' or 'midway'. That same medius root underlies a whole family of English words, including 'medium', 'mediate', 'mediocre', and 'mediterranean' (literally 'in the middle of the land'). The word entered English in the sixteenth century, at first as an adjective describing something positioned centrally, and later as a noun in geometry for a line drawn to the midpoint of a side. Its modern statistical sense, the value that sits exactly in the middle of an ordered set, became established in the nineteenth century as mathematics formalised ways of describing averages. The single d and the plain -ian ending are worth remembering, since the temptation is to overcomplicate a word that is simply 'middle' dressed in Latin clothing.

How the word is built

• medi- (from Latin medius: middle)
• -an (adjective/noun suffix)