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say it: meen
mean is an adjective, verb and noun meaning "approximating the statistical norm or average or expected value". It carries 16 recorded senses.
having or showing an ignoble lack of honor or morality
“that liberal obedience without which your army would be a base rabble”
“taking a mean advantage”
“chok'd with ambition of the meaner sort”
“something essentially vulgar and meanspirited in politics”
have as a logical consequence
“The water shortage means that we have to stop taking long showers”
have a specified degree of importance
“My ex-husband means nothing to me”
“Happiness means everything”
intend to refer to
“I'm thinking of good food when I talk about France”
“Yes, I meant you when I complained about people who gossip!”
an average of n numbers computed by adding some function of the numbers and dividing by some function of n
statistics
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for mean come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.