I actually heard a reporter once say that a literacy report was disturbing because almost half of students had below average scores.

Well, they would, wouldn’t they?

SPONSOR: GotoMeeting Hold your meetings online for just $49/mo. Try GoToMeeting FREE for 30 days.

The Oxford English Dictionary concludes its entry on average by saying “Few words have received more etymological investigation” and so I won’t be doing any second guessing on this one.

Starting at the most recent end I might as well work backwards.

It seems average is not your average word.

In this sense I use average to mean “typical” and this meaning appears to be only about 200 years old, although the word itself is about a thousand years old.

We can follow the logic of the word average meaning “typical” or “common” as it evolved out of a slightly earlier more mathematical meaning that we also still recognize; average denoting something like the “arithmetic mean.”

Strictly speaking the mean and the average aren’t the same thing and I see that Merriam Webster goes to great length to describe the difference.

The ethno-cultural perspective of the OED is revealed in the fact that they devote an entry to how the word average has been used in describing cricket scores—no other sports are mentioned. I guess it’s forgivable for a 100 year old passage in the premier English dictionary, to have an British perspective.

Getting back to average.  The mathematical meaning of average is well under three hundred years old.  Before that we have to dig back about 500 years to find that average meant “material loss.”

The examples given are such things as a ship out in a storm which had a pile of trade goods washed overboard. It was an accident, but someone has to pay for it and that payment was called the average.

The same ship might have been at risk of sinking and so the crew chopped off the mast to save it.  This action was intentional and so the cost was apportioned among the owners and crew and was also called an average.

Here we get the first inklings of how the word average might have gained its later mathematical sense.

Casting our researches even further back in time we come to citations from the Crusades and a document called the Assises of Jerusalem.  Here average isn’t an English word because this was a French document, but remember that the Normans had been in charge in England for a century or so by then.

The Assises of Jerusalem uses average to mean a “duty” or “tax”—again something you have to pay—and points us to the conclusion of most etymology sources, that average came from Mediterranean naval usage—a similar word appears in Italian.

So in English average is 500 years old, but curiously another word average appeared in English 500 years before that.  This average was enshrined in law as the service that a tenant farmer had to pay his king or lord, and despite this similarity to a tax, the word appears to have no etymological connection to its maritime homonym.