Percentile

How it is used

Common in growth charts, exam results, salary surveys and performance monitoring ('the 95th percentile response time'). The 25th, 50th and 75th percentiles are the quartiles, and the 50th percentile is the median. A child 'on the 80th percentile for height' is taller than about 80% of children of the same age.

Example sentences

1. Her score puts her in the 92nd percentile of all applicants.

2. We track the 95th percentile of page load time, not just the average.

Common collocations

• the 90th percentile
• percentile rank
• below the 5th percentile
• percentile score

Related terms

• quartileOne of the three values that divide ordered data into four equal parts: the first quartile (Q1), the median (Q2) and the third quartile (Q3).
• medianThe middle value when the data are put in order from smallest to largest; with an even number of values, it is the mean of the two middle ones.
• interquartile rangeThe distance between the first and third quartiles (Q3 − Q1), showing how spread out the middle 50% of the data is.
• z-scoreA value showing how many standard deviations an observation lies above or below the mean, found by subtracting the mean and dividing by the standard deviation.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

• percentile · Software Engineering
• percentile · Data Science & Analytics

More terms: Descriptive Statistics

• mean
• mode
• standard deviation
• variance
• range
• outlier
• frequency
• descriptive statistics
• weighted average
• cross-tabulation