metric

English

Etymology

From French métrique (1864), from New Latin metricus (“pertaining to the system based on the meter”), from metrum (“a meter”); see meter.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˈmɛt.ɹɪk/

• Audio (Southern England)

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ɛtɹɪk
• Hyphenation: met‧ric

Adjective

metric (not comparable)

1. Of or relating to the metric system of measurement.
2. (music) Of or relating to the meter of a piece of music.
3. (mathematics, physics) Of or relating to distance.

Derived terms

Translations

Noun

metric (plural metrics)

1. A measure for something; a means of deriving a quantitative measurement or approximation for otherwise qualitative phenomena (especially used in engineering).

   What metric should be used for performance evaluation?

   What are the most important metrics to track for your business?

   It's the most important single metric that quantifies the predictive performance.

   How to measure marketing? Use these key metrics for measuring marketing effectiveness.

   There is a lack of standard metrics.

   • 2011 April 10, Financial Times:

     As for the large number of official statements that Spain is safe, I think they are merely a metric of the complacency that has characterised the European crisis from the start.

   • 2013 August 3, “Boundary problems”, in The Economist‎, volume 408, number 8847:

     Economics is a messy discipline: too fluid to be a science, too rigorous to be an art. Perhaps it is fitting that economists’ most-used metric, gross domestic product (GDP), is a tangle too. GDP measures the total value of output in an economic territory. Its apparent simplicity explains why it is scrutinised down to tenths of a percentage point every month.

   • 2018, Clarence Green, James Lambert, “Advancing disciplinary literacy through English for academic purposes: Discipline-specific wordlists, collocations and word families for eight secondary subjects”, in Journal of English for Academic Purposes, volume 35, →DOI, page 106:

     The insight underlying such wordlists is that frequency, combined with metrics such as range and dispersion, profiles for teachers and students the relative usefulness of words.

2. (mathematical analysis) A function which satisfies a particular set of formal conditions, created to generalize the notion of the distance between two points. Formally, a real-valued function ${\displaystyle d}$ on ${\displaystyle M\times M}$, where ${\displaystyle M}$ is a set, is called a metric if (1) ${\displaystyle d(x,y)=0}$ if and only if ${\displaystyle x=y}$, (2) ${\displaystyle d(x,y)=d(y,x)}$ for all pairs ${\displaystyle (x,y)}$, and (3) ${\displaystyle d}$ obeys the triangle inequality.
   • 2000, Lutz Habermann, Riemannian Metrics of Constant Mass and Moduli Spaces of Conformal Structures‎:

     As we shall see, these metrics are constructed from a Green function.

3. (mathematics) A metric tensor.
4. Abbreviation of metric system.

Synonyms

• measure
• (mathematics): distance function

Hyponyms

• (mathematics): Euclidean metric, Hausdorff metric, spacetime metric, uniform metric, ultrametric

Derived terms

Translations

Verb

metric (third-person singular simple present metrics, present participle metricking, simple past and past participle metricked)

1. (transitive, aerospace, systems engineering) To measure or analyse statistical data concerning the quality or effectiveness of a process.

   We need to metric the status of software documentation.

   We need to metric the verification of requirements.

   We need to metric the system failures.

   The project manager is metricking the closure of the action items.

   Customer satisfaction was metricked by the marketing department.

See also

• meter
• avoirdupois

References

• metric on Wikipedia.Wikipedia

Further reading

• “metric”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.
• “metric”, in The Century Dictionary , New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911, →OCLC.
• Burago, Dimitri, Burago, Yuri, Ivanov, Sergei (2001) A Course in Metric Geometry, American Mathematical Soc., →ISBN, page 1

Friulian

Adjective

metric

1. metric

Romanian

Etymology

Borrowed from French métrique. By surface analysis, metru +‎ -ic.

Adjective

metric m or n (feminine singular metrică, masculine plural metrici, feminine and neuter plural metrice)

1. metric
2. metrical

Declension

Further reading

• metric in DEX online—Dicționare ale limbii române (Dictionaries of the Romanian language)