median
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
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6 characters
Language
English
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "median", 6-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Hunspell error dictionaries, and usage frequency ranked against the top 100,000 English words in the Wordfreq corpus. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "median" includes synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and cross-language translation pointers sourced from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org extract. Whether you are verifying the correct spelling of "median" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
median is aEnglishnoun. It means: A central vein or nerve, especially the median vein or median nerve running through the forearm and arm. Pronounced /ˈmiː.dɪən/. It ranks #6,591 in English word frequency. Often confused with Mein and Megan.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | median |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈmiː.dɪən/ |
| Letters | 6 |
| Frequency rank | #6,591 |
| Misspellings tracked | 7 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for median is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈmiː.dɪən/. Corpus data places it at rank #6,591 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for median, with forms such as "emdian", "mdeian", and "medain". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "Mein", "Megan", "medic", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: Borrowed from Middle French median, from Latin mediānus (“of or pertaining to the middle”, adjective), from medius (“middle”) (see medium), from Proto-Indo-European *médʰyos (“middle”). Doublet of mean and mizzen. Cognate with Old English midde, middel (“mi… Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is median, spelled M-E-D-I-A-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A central vein or nerve, especially the median vein or median nerve running through the forearm and arm.
- 2A line segment joining the vertex of triangle to the midpoint of the opposing side.
- 3A number separating the higher half from the lower half of a data sample, population, or probability distribution. The median of a finite list of numbers can be found by arranging all the observations from lowest value to highest value and picking the middle one (e.g., the median of {3, 3, 5, 9, 11} is 5). If there is an even number of observations, then there is no single middle value; the median is then usually defined to be the mean of the two middle values.
- 4The area separating two lanes of opposite-direction traffic.
Etymology
Borrowed from Middle French median, from Latin mediānus (“of or pertaining to the middle”, adjective), from medius (“middle”) (see medium), from Proto-Indo-European *médʰyos (“middle”). Doublet of mean and mizzen. Cognate with Old English midde, middel (“middle”). More at middle.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: emdian,mdeian,medain,meddian,mediann,meidan,mmedian
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for median
Misspelling Variants of "median"
Frequency rank: #6,591 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter M in our English index: