There are 4 measures of central tendency - mode, median, arithmetic mean (what people are thinking of when they say average), and geometric mean. Geometric mean gets used in special circumstances, and usually by people who know why.
Any stats book will explain measures of central tendency. It will also explain variability and outliers, which is what the 100k, 100k, 100k, 100k and 1,000,000,000K is an example of.
It is a lot easier to discuss things when everyone is on the same page re terms. Much less foam.
Am I nit-picking? Maybe, but I come from a discipline where the same word can mean different things depending on context, and we need to be clear. "Population" comes to mind.
There is literally nothing anybody can say to me to convince me that a median or mode is an average.
Holy closed mind, Batman! Although you gotta appreciate the heads up since we can't actually see him sticking his fingers in his ears and yelling 'La, La, La!"
But I will add that there is "literally" nothing you can say to me to convince me that johnny847 is a more authoritative source on the english language than the Webster dictionary.
Mode, mean and median are all averages. Mode could definitely considered a better average if the mean and median are significantly skewed by outliers. Can you just stop writing Median average? It goes without saying that its an average. What else could it be other than an average? Just say Median, mean or mode.
There's 5 guys with incomes of 100k, 100k, 100k, 100k and 1,000,000,000 a year. What's the best average?
But the median is not skewed by outliers - in this case both the median and the mode are 100k, but the average is completely different. It depends upon what you are calculating.
We were taught that they are all averages, but who cares? Use the best one for the circumstances.