outlier

UK/ˈaʊtˌlaɪə(ɹ)/US/ˈaʊtˌlaɪə(ɹ)/

nounC1Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechleans written

Other forms: outliers

An outlier is a result that sits far away from all the others. A clear outlier, exclude the outlier, treat it as an outlier.

Dropping one is a decision that has to be justified, since an outlier may be the most interesting reading rather than a mistake. Of a person the word means somebody far outside the usual pattern.

Definitions of outlier

1nounoutlierA result that sits far away from all the others.C1
“One outlier was pulling the whole average upwards.”

outlier is a result.

Where it comes from

From outlie + -er.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Academic English

Practise this word

outlier in the wild

Malagasy, spoken on the island of Madagascar off the eastern coast of Africa in the Indian Ocean, is the furthest western outlier.
Malayo-Polynesian languages
In statistics, an outlier is a data point that differs significantly from other observations.
Outlier
An outlier can be an indication of exciting possibility, but can also cause serious problems in statistical analyses.
Outlier
Polynesian outliers are a number of culturally Polynesian societies that geographically lie outside the main region of Polynesian influence, known as the Polynesian Triangle.
Polynesian outlier
Instead, Polynesian outliers are scattered in the two other Pacific subregions, Melanesia and Micronesia.
Polynesian outlier

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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