My native language is English and I'm fluent and well educated.

Although I do know that "average" covers mean, median and mode, when I was young I was not taught that way. First I was just taught "average" with a formula, and many years later "median" and "mode". I don't think I noticed the term "mean" until I learned about median and mode.

You can see this reflected in scientific calculators used at school, where the button for calculating mean is labelled "Avg".

And in Microsoft Excel or LibreOffice Calc, the function to calculate mean is called "AVERAGE".

So nobody should be hard on themselves for not knowing the difference. You probably weren't taught the difference, and common tools work against it.

It looks to me that the common word for statistical mean is "average" in English, but it's not the correct technical language.

> So far as I can tell, the common word for statistical mean is "average" in English

You're quite probably right about common parlance..

> but it's not the correct technical language.

..but as you point out it's not really appropriate in a technical context, indeed I don't think I've come across the term "average" being used in this way in technical literature; I've normally either seen expectation (for probability theoretic cases) or mean (for statistical cases).

> So nobody should be hard on themselves for not knowing the difference.

Absolutely, which is why I think being hard on someone for not knowing the difference between "the average" and the median is similarly an issue.

You realize that an interview is not the same as writing a technical article, right? It should be a conversation between two potential coworkers, and, in that context, I think saying "average" instead of "mean" is totally fine.

Incidentally, "mean" doesn't quite cut it, if you want to be a stickler about it. There are several types of means: arithmetic, geometric, harmonic, etc. By that standard, you just failed the interview.

> "mean" doesn't quite cut it, if you want to be a stickler about it.

I'm going to assume, then, that you didn't read my original comment which started off this line of discussion? By that standard, you just failed the interview. ;)

Sorry, I dropped this! :P

Touche.

In most practical situations, your initial impression is correct. As a native English speaker, I've never heard seen or heard someone use "average" to refer to a statistical summary other than the mean. If it doesn't refer to the mean, it doesn't mean anything formal/technical at all. I read GP as "median is sort of an average in the broad sense", but this is honestly kind of a stretch.

I see it quite commonly, from technical discussions to newspaper article. When people say "the average income in the US" they are almost never talking about the mean.

I think they are. I doubt any newspaper articles use it to refer to the median, at least I've never seen them use it like that. Do you have any examples?

Almost every discussion about average salary or iq uses median. Even finding results for mean salary is difficult. The first page of results for mean us salary gives a list of results for average, many of which specify they are actually the median.

https://www.google.com/search?q=mean+us+salary

Well, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average... as a counterpoint. Almost all the Wikipedia pages about average wage use mean.

Math definitions only..

French and English are strictly equivalent.

moyenne is mean or average. The formal name is "arithmetic mean" and "moyenne arithmétique".

median is médiane. people frequently use any word but median in both languages when they want to talk about the median.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_mean

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moyenne_arithm%C3%A9tique

Almost correct.

The mean, median, and mode are three types of averages. None is 'the average'; though if you asked someone random on the street they'd probably give you the mean average.

On an average day?

Mode: On a typical day <<-- most common meaning for average in day to day conversation

Mean: On a day that is in the calculated middle (for some variance) <<-- most common meaning when we think the question is about math

Median: On a day that is the middle for all the possible days <<-- nobody thinks of this, but they think this is what the mean is.

This really depends on context. When evaluating a likelihood (prediction), "average" is generally colloquial for "expected median."