mean

verb

1. (transitive)To intend.

   “I didn't mean to knock your tooth out.”

   “I mean to go to Arévalo in Spain this summer; I’ve been meaning to tell you for weeks, but I’ve just found the time.”

   “I meant to take the car in for a smog check, but it slipped my mind.”

   “The authors meant a challenge to the status quo.”

   “Do you mean to say you regret it after all?”

2. (intransitive)To intend.

   “Don't be angry; she meant well.”

3. (passive, regional, transitive)To intend.

   “Actually this desk was meant for the subeditor.”

   “Man was not meant to question such things.”

4. (transitive)To intend.

   “Your reasoning seems needlessly abstruse, complex, and verbose for me. I mean, could you dumb it down for my sake?”

5. (transitive)To convey (a meaning).

   “The sky is red this morning—does that mean we're in for a storm?”

   “An artificial kidney these days still means a refrigerator-sized dialysis machine. Such devices mimic the way real kidneys cleanse blood and eject impurities and surplus water as urine.”

6. (transitive)To convey (a meaning).

   “What does this hieroglyph mean?”

   “A term should be included if it’s likely that someone would run across it and want to know what it means.”

   “Americans, for example, call newcomers to Antarctica “fingies”, which comes from FNGs – a borrowed military abbreviation that means “Fucking New Guy”.”

7. (transitive)To convey (a meaning).

   “I’m afraid I don’t understand what you mean.”

   “He’s a little different, if you know what I mean.”

8. (transitive)To have conviction in (something said or expressed); to be sincere in (what one says).

   “Does she really mean what she said to him last night?”

   “Say what you mean and mean what you say.”

9. (transitive)To cause or produce (a given result); to bring about (a given result).

   “One faltering step means certain death.”

   “This breakthrough will mean that we spend less on electricity bills.”

   “It was a goal that meant West Ham won on their first appearance at Wembley in 31 years, in doing so becoming the first team since Leicester in 1996 to bounce straight back to the Premier League through the play-offs.”

   “One of the hidden glories of Victorian engineering is proper drains.[…]But out of sight is out of mind. And that, together with the inherent yuckiness of the subject, means that many old sewers have been neglected and are in dire need of repair.”

10. (usually)To be of some level of importance.

    “That little dog meant everything to me.”

    “Formality and titles mean nothing in their circle.”

11. (Ireland, UK, regional)To lament.

    “All the tyme of his sickness he never said, “Alace!” or meaned any pain, whilk was marvellous. Never man died in greater peace of mind or body.”

    ““ If you should die for me, sir knight, “ There’s few for you will mane, “ For many a better has died for me, “ Whose graves are growing green.”

adj

1. (obsolete)Common; general.
2. (archaic)Of a common or low origin, grade, or quality; common; humble.

   “a man of mean parentage”

   “a mean abode”

   “Thinke you I weigh this treaſure more than you? Not all the Gold in Indias welthy armes, Shall buy the meaneſt ſouldier in my traine.”

   “After every qualification of property had been laid aside, the armies of the Roman emperors were still commanded, for the most part, by officers of liberal birth and education; but the common soldiers, like the mercenary troops of modern Europe, were drawn from the meanest, and very frequently from the most profligate, of mankind.”

   “Why lies He in such mean estate, Where ox and ass are feeding?”

3. Low in quality or degree; inferior; poor; shabby.

   “a mean appearance”

   “a mean dress”

4. Without dignity of mind; destitute of honour; low-minded; spiritless; base.

   “a mean motive”

   “It was mean of you to steal that little girl's piggy bank.”

   “Can you imagine I ſo mean could prove, / To ſave my Life by changing of my Love?”

   “Prince John: Your foe has bloodied you, sir knight. Will you concede defeat? You fight too well to die so mean a death. Will you not throw in your lot with me instead? Ivanhoe: That would be an even meaner death, Your Grace.”

   “The story struck the depressingly familiar note with which true stories ring in the tried ears of experienced policemen. No one queried it. It was in the classic pattern of human weakness, mean and embarrassing and sad.”

5. Of little value or worth; worthy of little or no regard; contemptible; despicable.

   “The Roman legions and great Caesar found / Our fathers no mean foes.”

6. (UK)Ungenerous; stingy; tight-fisted.

   “He's so mean. I've never seen him spend so much as five pounds on presents for his children.”

7. Disobliging; pettily offensive or unaccommodating.
8. Intending to cause harm, successfully or otherwise; bearing ill will towards another.

   “Watch out for her: she's mean. I said good morning to her, and she punched me in the nose.”

9. Powerful; fierce; strong.

   “It must have been a mean typhoon that levelled this town.”

   “[…]in the context of ships available at the time, they were aircraft carrier - fleet carriers. Now, granted, they may not have been the biggest and largest and meanest fleet carriers around, but they certainly were fleet carriers.”

10. (colloquial)Hearty; spicy.

    “We were sitting in Poetta’s candlelit kitchen waiting for some of her gut-burning chili to get done. Everybody that knows Poetta knows that she makes a mean chili that if you eat it by lunchtime, it can clean out your entire system by the end of the day.”

    “She wasn’t the most accomplished cook in the world but she cold make a mean stew, she knew how to roast a chicken, and she could whip up eggs at least three different ways.”

11. (colloquial)Accomplished with great skill; deft; hard to compete with.

    “Your mother can roll a mean cigarette.”

    “He hits a mean backhand.”

    “A Robot Makes a Mean Caesar Salad, but Will It Cost Jobs? [title]”

12. (childish, informal, often)Difficult, tricky.

    “This problem is mean!”

13. (not-comparable)Having the mean as its value; average.

    “The mean family has 2.4 children.”

    “In the mountain region of A-erh-t'ai Shan and Hsiang-t'ien Shan⁷, if the mean west wind velocity is five meters per second, the high tendency at 700mb on the anterior mountain slope may exceed 40 meters in 12 hours.”

14. (not-comparable, obsolete)Middling; intermediate; moderately good, tolerable.

    “I have declared in the causes what harm costiveness hath done in procuring this disease; if it be so noxious, the opposite must needs be good, or mean at least, as indeed it is […].”

    “being of middle age and a mean stature”

    “according to the fittest style of lofty, mean, or lowly”

noun

1. (also)A method or course of action used to achieve some result.

   “To say truth, it is a meane full of uncertainty and danger.”

   “You may be able, by this mean, to review your own scientific acquirements.”

   “Philosophical doubt is not an end, but a mean.”

   “Mr Obama produced an only slightly less ambitious goal for deficit reduction than the House Republicans, albeit working from a more forgiving baseline: $4 trillion over 12 years compared to $4.4 trillion over 10 years. But the means by which he would achieve it are very different.”

2. (obsolete, singular)An intermediate step or intermediate steps.

   “Verily in this treatise this hath been mine only purpose; and the mean to bring the same to effect hath been such as whereby I studied to profit wholesomely, not to please delicately.”

   “a. 1623, John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi Apply desperate physic: / We must not now use balsamum, but fire, / The smarting cupping-glass, for that's the mean / To purge infected blood, such blood as hers.”

3. Something which is intermediate or in the middle; an intermediate value or range of values; a medium.

   “Then will not this constitution be a kind of mean between aristocracy and oligarchy?”

   “as a mean, it implies certain extremes between which it lies, namely the more and the less”

   “1875, William Smith and Samuel Cheetham, editors, A Dictionary of Christian Antiquities, Little, Brown and Company, volume 1, page 10, s.v. Accentus Ecclesiasticus, It presents a sort of mean between speech and song, continually inclining towards the latter, never altogether leaving its hold on the former; it is speech, though always attuned speech, in passages of average interest and importance; it is song, though always distinct and articulate song, in passages demanding more fervid utterance.”

4. (historical)The middle part of three-part polyphonic music; now specifically, the alto part in polyphonic music; an alto instrument.

   “Of these [rattles] they have Base, Tenor, Countertenor, Meane, and Treble.”

5. Any function of multiple variables that satisfies certain properties and yields a number representative of its arguments; or, the number so yielded; a measure of central tendency.

   “Note that (1.41) is simply the probability-weighted mean without any explicit allowance for the stratification; each observation is weighted by its inflation factor and the total divided by the total of the inflation factors for the survey.”

   “Luckily, even though the arithmetic mean is unusable, both the harmonic and geometric means settle to precise values as the amount of data increases.”

   “The generalized power means include power means, certain Gini means, in particular the counter-harmonic means.”

6. Any function of multiple variables that satisfies certain properties and yields a number representative of its arguments; or, the number so yielded; a measure of central tendency.

   “While the average age of the rioter was 27.8 years, the mean age of the nonrioter was 38.1.”

7. Either of the two numbers in the middle of a conventionally presented proportion, as 2 and 3 in 1:2=3:6.

   “...if four numbers be in proportion, the product of the first and last, or of the two extremes, is equal to the product of the second and third, or of the two means.”

   “Using the means-extremes property of proportions, you know that the product of the extremes equals the product of the means. The ratio t/4 = 5/2 can be rewritten as t:4 = 5:2, in which the extremes are t and 2, and the means are 4 and 5.”

   “In #92;frac#123;18#125;#123;27#125;#61;#92;frac23, the product of the means is 2#92;cdot27, and the product of the extremes is 18#92;cdot3. Both products are 54.”

name

1. (abbreviation, acronym, alt-of)Acronym of MongoDB, Express.js, AngularJS, Node.js: a software stack for developing web sites with both client-side and server-side use of JavaScript.