quintile

noun quin·tile \ ˈkwin-ˌtī(-ə)l \

|Updated on: 22 Jul 2018

Editor's Note: Breaking Down the Meaning of quintile

Definition of quintile

: any of the four values that divide the items of a frequency distribution into five classes with each containing one fifth of the total population; also : any one of the five classes

Recent Examples of quintile from the Web

Those in the lowest income quintile could lose 49% of their tax gains.

— the editorial board, WSJ, "Tariffs and the Tax Cut," 12 June 2018
That’s more than 21 times the average income ($13,809) of those in the bottom 20 percent, or quintile (as economists put it).

— david wessel, Newsweek, "Does the Tax System Reduce Inequality?," 12 Apr. 2015
For Boise, this meant that the average income among households in the top 20 percent soared to almost $182,000 while incomes in the bottom quintile stagnated around $12,000.

— wei lu, Bloomberg.com, "These Are the U.S. Cities With the Fastest-Growing Wealth Gaps," 19 Apr. 2018
Since 1987, the proportion of applicants from the lowest quintile of U.S. households has not exceeded 5.5 percent.

— aaron saguil, Washington Post, "Med school doesn’t have to lead to crushing debt," 31 Jan. 2018
Of the 200 countries with the highest rates of deaths from gun violence and the 100 countries that spend the most per capita on video games, only the United States is in the upper quintile on both metrics.

— philip bump, Washington Post, "If video games spur gun violence, it’s only in the United States," 22 Feb. 2018
Source: Tax Policy Center The Tax Policy Center also offers a closer look at the income tax for those in the top quintile, who earn anywhere from $150,000 to $100 million and up.

— laura saunders, WSJ, "Top 20% of Americans Will Pay 87% of Income Tax," 6 Apr. 2018
Nearly two-thirds of the tax cuts Republicans passed in December will go to the top income quintile this year, according to the Tax Policy Center.

— Anchorage Daily News, "Get ready. Republicans want to cut taxes again.," 16 Mar. 2018
That number drops to 4.1% in wealthy communities and soars to 38.3% for Hispanic women in the poorest quintile.

— ellen mcgirt, Fortune, "raceAhead: A New UN Report Shows U.S. Women Falling Behind," 12 Feb. 2018

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'quintile.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.

Breaking Down the Meaning of quintile

Many people have a deep interest in statistics about themselves, whether the information provided is about income, ice-cream consumption, or trash production. And any such rating can be divided into fifths, or quintiles. The fifth or lowest quintile would include the 20 percent of the population who make the least money or eat the least ice cream or generate the least trash, and the first quintile would include the 20 percent who make, eat, or generate the most.

Origin and Etymology of quintile

Latin quintus + English ²-ile

NEW! Time Traveler

First Known Use: 1922

in the meaning defined above

See Words from the same year

Financial Definition of QUINTILE

quintile

noun

What It Is

A quintile is one of five equal parts.

How It Works

For example, if we were to look at all of the closing prices for Company XYZ stock for every day in the last year, the top 20% of those prices would represent the upper quintile of the data. The bottom 20% of those prices would represent the lower quintile of the data. There would be three quintiles in between the upper and lower quintiles. The average of all the stock prices typically falls right in the middle, between the second and fourth quintiles.

Why It Matters

Quintiles are crucial for studying economic data, income data, stock data, and virtually any other kind of financial information. By breaking things into quintiles, an analyst can make a variety of inferences about the data and how the observed item behaves.

Source: Investing Answers