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average

Average began as a shipping term: the damage to cargo at sea, and the loss shared out among all the merchants with goods aboard. Most dictionaries trace it through Italian avaria to Arabic ʿawāriyya 'damaged goods', but the OED prefers a Romance origin; sharing losses in proportion gave English the arithmetic mean, while German Havarie and Russian avariya kept the damage: an accident.

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1100Arabic

Hops are evenly spaced; labels show the year each form is first attested.

average

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