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Statistics vocabulary · Descriptive Statistics

Range

Meaning in statistics, with examples

/reɪndʒ/nounCore term

In statistics, range means: The difference between the largest and the smallest value in a data set; the simplest measure of spread.

In Turkish: açıklık, değişim aralığı, ranj

How it is used

Often given as the two end points rather than one number: 'ages ranged from 19 to 64'. Because it depends only on the two most extreme values, a single outlier can change it a lot. The verb pattern 'range from … to …' is very common in results sections.

Example sentences

  1. Participants' ages ranged from 19 to 64.

  2. The range is misleading here because of one extreme value.

Common collocations

  • range from … to …
  • wide range
  • narrow range
  • interquartile range
  • interquartile rangeThe distance between the first and third quartiles (Q3 − Q1), showing how spread out the middle 50% of the data is.
  • standard deviationA measure of how spread out values are around the mean; a small value means the data sit close to the mean, a large one means they are widely scattered.
  • outlierAn observation that lies unusually far from most of the other values in a data set; it may come from an error or from a genuinely unusual case.
  • varianceThe average of the squared distances between each value and the mean; it measures spread, and its square root is the standard deviation.

More terms: Descriptive Statistics

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