- mean (between A and B) a quality, condition, or way of doing something that is in the middle of two extremes and better than either of them
- He needed to find a mean between frankness and rudeness.
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- (also arithmetic mean)(mathematics) the value found by adding together all the numbers in a group, and dividing the total by the number of numbers see also geometric meanTopics Maths and measurementc2
middle way
average
Word Originnoun Middle English: from Old French meien, from Latin medianus ‘middle’, from medius ‘mid’.
Idioms
See mean in the Oxford Advanced American DictionarySee mean in the Oxford Learner's Dictionary of Academic Englishthe happy/golden mean
- (approving) a course of action that is not extreme
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mean