median

Definitions

• (anatomy) A central vein or nerve, especially the median vein or median nerve running through the forearm and arm.
• (geometry) A line segment joining the vertex of triangle to the midpoint of the opposing side.
• (statistics) The number separating the higher half of a data sample, a population, or a probability distribution, from the lower half. The median of a finite list of numbers can be found by arranging all the observations from lowest value to highest value and picking the middle one (e.g., the median of {3, 3, 5, 9, 11} is 5). If there is an even number of observations, then there is no single middle value; the median is then usually defined to be the arithmetic mean of the two middle values.
• (US) The median strip; the area separating two lanes of opposite-direction traffic.