standard deviation

noun

, Statistics.

1. a measure of dispersion in a frequency distribution, equal to the square root of the mean of the squares of the deviations from the arithmetic mean of the distribution.

standard deviation

noun

1. statistics a measure of dispersion obtained by extracting the square root of the mean of the squared deviations of the observed values from their mean in a frequency distribution

standard deviation

/ stăn′dərd /

1. A statistic used as a measure of the dispersion or variation in a distribution, equal to the square root of the arithmetic mean of the squares of the deviations from the arithmetic mean.

standard deviation

1. In statistics , a measure of how much the data in a certain collection are scattered around the mean . A low standard deviation means that the data are tightly clustered; a high standard deviation means that they are widely scattered.

Notes

About sixty-eight percent of the data are within one standard deviation of the mean.

Word History and Origins

Origin of standard deviation¹

First recorded in 1920–25

Example Sentences

But the young adults of the Bernie brigade have entered middle age, and their economic views are no longer a standard deviation or two removed from the mean.

From Slate

"Our study proposed a simple yet objective method for determining hotspots using standard deviation values. This is the first time that this has been done."

From Science Daily

New York provides a range of standard deviation, specifying a 68% probability that the GDP figure will fall between 1.07% and 3.99%.

From Los Angeles Times

Algorithmic predictions have been found to account for 4.7 times more health disparities in pain relative to the standard deviation, and has been shown to result in racial biases in cardiology, radiology and nephrology, just to name a few.

From Scientific American

Standard deviation measures how much variation there is in your sample.

From Scientific American