What is a 'Mode'

A statistical term that refers to the most frequently occurring number found in a set of numbers. The mode is found by collecting and organizing the data in order to count the frequency of each result. The result with the highest occurrences is the mode of the set.

Other related terms include the mean, or the average of a set; and the median, or the middle value in a set.


For example, in the following list of numbers, 16 is the mode since it appears more times than any other number in the set:
3, 3, 6, 9, 16, 16, 16, 27, 27, 37, 48

A set of numbers can have more than one mode (this is known as bimodal) if there are multiple numbers that occur with equal frequency, and more times than the others in the set.

3, 3, 3, 9, 16, 16, 16, 27, 37, 48

In this example, both the number 3 and the number 16 are modes. If no number in a set of numbers occurs more than once, that set has no mode:

3, 6, 9, 16, 27, 37, 48