Outlier
Etymology
Literally “one who lies outside.” In the 17th century it meant a person who lived away from their place of work or a stone detached from a formation; the statistical sense of a distant data point is modern.
noun · /OWT-ly-er/
A data point that lies far from the rest, whether from a real extreme or an error.
What it names
It marks the case that can either wreck an average or reveal the most important part of the story.
Example
One billionaire moving to a small town is an outlier that can lift the town’s average income without changing a single resident’s life.
Related idea
Discarding an outlier can be honest data-cleaning or quiet manipulation; unlike a mere point far from the mean, a genuine outlier may be the signal — the fraud, the breakthrough — not the noise.