The median, as the name suggests, is the middle value of a series arranged in any of the orders of magnitude i.e. ascending or descending order.

As distinct from the arithmetic mean which is calculated from the value of every item in the series, the median is what is called a positional average. The term 'position' refers to the place of a value in the series. The median is just the 50^th percentile value below which 50% of the values in the sample fall. The object of median is, therefore, not merely to fix a value that shall be representative of a set, but also to establish a dividing line separating the higher from the lower values.