outlier

noun

out·​li·​er ˈau̇t-ˌlī(-ə)r 

1

: a person whose residence and place of business are at a distance

His house was a place of refuge for outliers.

2

: something (such as a geologic feature) that is situated away from or classed differently from a main or related body

The island is an outlier on the southeast side of the archipelago.

3

a

: a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample

Values that are outliers give disproportionate weight to larger over smaller values.

b

: a person or thing that is atypical within a particular group, class, or category

She was an outlier when she launched her cruelty-free, sustainably minded brand in 2001, but has found the centre of gravity shifting in her direction.

—Jess Cartner-Morley

Among the world's wealthy nations, the United States is an outlier on this issue: Americans have the lowest national minimum wage, relative to the median wage, of any of the wealthy nations represented in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

—Christopher Ingraham

Examples of outlier in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Equities trading was the outlier this quarter, posting an 18% revenue increase to $3.5 billion, more than half a billion dollars higher than the $2.96 billion estimate from StreetAccount. —Hugh Son, CNBC, 15 Oct. 2024

This is made possible through solutions that provide an intuitive visualization interface for data, facilitating analysis of the data, identifying outliers and deriving insights from clustering patterns. —Doron Sitbon, Forbes, 11 Oct. 2024

For the past 20 years, the United States has been a unicorn-chasing society, always on the prowl for golden outliers. —Nathan Heller, Vogue, 11 Oct. 2024

The ostensible outlier on Trump’s podcast tour is Fridman, who is neither a frat boy nor a comedian. —Brady Brickner-Wood, The New Yorker, 10 Oct. 2024

Word History

First Known Use

1606, in the meaning defined at sense 3b