statistic

UK/stəˈtɪs.tɪk/US/stəˈtɪs.tɪk/

nounB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,008 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: statistics

A statistic is a single figure drawn from collected data. One number, standing for a great many things.

The singular is worth separating from the plural, since statistics as a subject is the whole discipline and a statistic is one fact out of it. The word has a bleak idiomatic use, since becoming a statistic means dying or being harmed in a way that will be counted rather than remembered, and road safety campaigns use it deliberately. A vital statistic is a key figure, and the plural of that phrase means something quite different again.

Definitions of statistic

1nounstatisticA single numerical fact drawn from a body of data.B2+
“He quoted one statistic that nobody could verify.”

Where it comes from

a back-formation from statistics.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

statistic in the wild

Baseball statistics collect a variety of metrics used to evaluate player and team performance in the sport of baseball.
Baseball statistics
A number of statistics are defined in the Official Baseball Rules, which task the official scorer with providing a report after each game.
Baseball statistics
A statistic (singular) or sample statistic is any quantity computed from values in a sample which is considered for a statistical purpose.
Statistic
The average (or mean) of sample values is a statistic.
Statistic
A sufficient statistic for a model parameter contains all of the information that the dataset provides about that parameter.
Sufficient statistic

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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.

Related words

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