central tendency

American

noun

Statistics.

the tendency of samples of a given measurement to cluster around some central value.

central tendency British

noun

statistics the tendency of the values of a random variable to cluster around the mean, median, and mode

"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

Etymology

Origin of central tendency

First recorded in 1925–30

Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

See Examples For:

central tendency

The study, published in eLife, describes how the model shows neural circuits can give rise to both recency and central tendency biases at the same time through a single mechanism.

From Science Daily ● Apr. 24, 2024

A central tendency of people with a narcissistic personality is that they treat other people as an extension of themselves and their bodies.

From Salon ● Jul. 21, 2023

According to Laerd Statistics, “a measure of central tendency is a single value that attempts to describe a set of data by identifying the central position within that set of data.”

From Slate ● Dec. 5, 2019

Mean a number that measures the central tendency; a common name for mean is "average."

From Textbooks ● Sep. 19, 2013

Figure 61 shows that these adults varied from no problems solved correctly to eighteen, around eight as a central tendency.

From The Psychology of Arithmetic by Edward L. (Edward Lee) Thorndike

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Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023