Typical describes something that shows exactly what its kind is like — the ordinary, expected version of the thing. A typical English summer: warm for four days, then rain. A typical Tuesday, a typical price, a typical seven-year-old.
It takes OF when you name what the thing is representing: typical of the period, typical of that part of the coast, typical of her. There is a second use, sharper, said with a sigh — "Typical!" on its own, or "that's typical of him", meaning the annoying thing was precisely what you expected. The opposite, atypical, is a stiff word that mostly lives in medical writing. Do not use typical to mean average in the arithmetic sense: a typical salary is the one you would expect to see on a job advert, not a number you worked out by dividing. And watch the spelling — one p, one c, ending in -al.
1adjectivetypicalHaving the qualities you expect of its kind; representative of the group.~98%
“A typical morning starts with the dog barking at the postman.”
synonyms: representative, standard, characteristic
2adjectivebehavingBehaving exactly as someone or something always does, said with irritation.~2%
“He turned up an hour late, which is typical.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 20 sentences found in the wild and placed 20 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
The Greek τύπος (typos) meant a mark or an impression — the dent a blow leaves, the shape a stamp presses into wax. Latin took it as typicus and then typicalis, and English arrived at typical: belonging to the type. A typical example is one that carries the stamp of its kind, the way every coin struck from one die carries the same face.
Proto-Indo-European
*(s)tewp-
Latin
typicalis
English, today
typical
Built from
From Latin typicalis, from Latin typicus (“typical”), from Ancient Greek τυπικός (“of or pertaining to a type, conformable, typical”), from τύπος (“mark, impression, type”), equivalent to typic + al and type + ical.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA