on the average
- idiom
:
en promedio
- The questionnaire included an item asking, "On the average, how many times do you run each week?"
How long do you have to wait on the average to find yourself in that region?
- How long do you have to wait on the average to find yourself in that region?
- That means that a couple will only produce fewer than one child on the average in their lifetime.
- Now if you look at more distant supernovae, the light has had to travel for a long time to reach us, which means they are on the average younger.
- So we get easily enough protein on the average diet, we get more than we need.
- Women, in contrast, are more likely on the average when they were lacking social support.
- Only when we add them up on the average the correct and we get the correct AB.
- And what I tried to do was to study problems behavior on the average or with high probability.
Examples
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It is also clear when making comparisons that, at a minimum, at the end of twelve years of schooling, Japanese children have attended school on the average of four more years in terms of U.S. school days than their American counterparts.
Academic text (1993) -
On the average, families in that area earn a higher income than those in the nearby city.
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So this is what you expect to get on the average if you keep playing that game.
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So we get easily enough protein on the average diet, we get more than we need.
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That means that a couple will only produce fewer than one child on the average in their lifetime.
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On the average, most students score higher on math tests than on reading tests.
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The car gets, on the average, thirty miles per gallon in city driving.
Synonyms
∞
1.0
Most of the time
∞
1.0
Usually or in most cases
186
1.0
In most cases
89
3.4
To say that something is true in most cases
52
2.6
Happens most of the time
28
2.8
Usually in most cases
9
3.7
In most cases
Antonyms
How Typical
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'typically' is directly derivable from combining 'on' (regarding/concerning) with 'average' (the typical or mean value); the determiner 'the' is a function word and does not block this compositional reading. This construction is common cross-linguistically (e.g. Spanish 'en promedio', French 'en moyenne'), so a B1 learner who knows the constituent words will readily infer the intended sense.
Etymology
The phrase on the average comes from the idea of looking at many things together to find one usual amount. Imagine adding many numbers and dividing by how many items there are to get an average number, so on the average means 'typically' when you look at all cases.