Other forms: benchmarks, benchmarked, benchmarking
A benchmark is the result everybody else gets measured against. The fastest lap of the day, last year's exam average, the rival product whose price sets the level — one number that turns a page of results into better or worse.
It works as a verb too: you benchmark your prices against a competitor, or benchmark a school against the national average. It takes against for the thing you compare with, and for for what it is a standard of, as in the benchmark for safety in the industry. In computing a benchmark is a fixed test run on different machines so their speeds line up side by side. Keep it apart from milestone, which people reach for as though the two were the same thing: a milestone is a point you pass on a journey, and a benchmark is a level you are trying to match.
1nounbenchmarkA standard that other results are measured against.~76%
“Her time set the benchmark for the season.”
synonyms: standard, reference point
2verbmeasureTo measure something against that standard.~6%
“They benchmarked their salaries against the rest of the sector.”
3nounmarketingA fixed test used to compare how well machines or systems perform.~18%
“The new chip beat every benchmark.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 123 sentences found in the wild and placed 109 of them on a sense (14 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Benchmark is bench plus mark, and it began outdoors. A surveyor cut a mark into a stone, then rested a bracket — a bench, in the trade's own word for it — in the cut, so his measuring equipment sat at the same fixed point every time he came back. That is what a benchmark still is: somebody else's mark, still holding, that you take your own reading from. The figurative sense arrived around 1884.
From bench + mark. First use appears c. 1842. Originally a mark cut into a stone by land surveyors to secure a bench (from land surveying jargon in the 19th century, meaning a type of bracket), to mount measuring equipment. The figurative sense first appears c. 1884.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA