Average
Etymology
Surprisingly, from Arabic “awariya” (damaged goods), which entered Mediterranean maritime law via Italian and French “avaria” as the shared loss when cargo was jettisoned. Because that loss was divided proportionally among owners, “average” came to mean an equalizing middle figure only later.
noun · /AV-rij/
A single number meant to represent a whole set — but a word that can secretly mean the mean, the median, or the mode.
What it names
It flags a genuine ambiguity: “the average” sounds precise while hiding which calculation was used.
Example
“The average salary is 90,000” tells you little until you ask whether that is the mean, inflated by a few executives, or the median.
Related idea
Because “average” can quietly denote the mean, the median, or the mode, a careful writer names which one — the vagueness is often where a misleading statistic lives.