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average[average 词源字典]

average: [15] The word average has a devious history. It began in Arabic, as ‘awārīya, the plural of ‘awār, a noun derived from the verb ‘āra ‘mutilate’; this was used as a commercial term, denoting ‘damaged merchandise’. The first European language to adopt it was Italian, as avaria, and it passed via Old French avarie into English (where in the 16th century it acquired its -age ending, probably by association with the then semantically similar damage).

Already by this time it had come to signify the ‘financial loss incurred through damage to goods in transit’, and this passed in the 17th century to the ‘equal sharing of such loss by those with a financial interest in the goods’, and eventually, in the 18th century, to the current (mathematical and general) sense of ‘mean’.
[average etymology, average origin, 英语词源]