variance

UK/ˈvɛə.ɹi.əns/US/ˈvæɹ.i.əns/

nounC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #11,511 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: variances

Variance is a difference, or the state of disagreeing. At variance with, a variance in the accounts, explain the variance.

At variance with is the fixed phrase and means in conflict with. In statistics variance is a precise measure of how spread out a set of numbers is, and it is the square of the standard deviation.

Definitions of variance

1nounvarianceA difference, or the state of disagreeing.C1
“There was a small variance between the two sets of accounts.”

variance is a difference.

Where it comes from

Old French variance comes from Latin variare, to change or vary.

Latin
variaunce
Old French
variance
Middle English
variance
English, today
variance

From Middle English variance, variaunce, equivalent to vary + -ance, from Old French variance or directly from Anglo-Latin variaunce, veriaunce, wariaunce; all from Latin variantia.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

variance in the wild

Analysis of variance (ANOVA) is a family of statistical methods used to compare the means of two or more groups by analyzing variance.
Analysis of variance
A useful property of the standard deviation is that, unlike the variance, it is expressed in the same unit as the data.
Standard deviation
The standard deviation is the square root of the variance.
Variance
Another disadvantage is that the variance is not finite for many distributions.
Variance
An F-test is a statistical test that compares variances.
F-test

1 / 2

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.

From Project Gutenberg, public domain. These sentences are from real books, shown to illustrate the word at work.

← Vocabulary