metric

Etymology

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

adj

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.

noun

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.
   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. April 10 2011, Financial Times
   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. 2013-08-03, “Boundary problems”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8847
   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. 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
2. (mathematics) A function for the measurement of the "distance" between two points in some metric space: it is a real-valued function d(x,y) between points x and y satisfying the following properties: (1) "non-negativity": d(x,y)>0, (2) "identity of indiscernibles": d(x,y)=0 mbox iffx=y, (3) "symmetry": d(x,y)=d(y,x), and (4) "triangle inequality": d(x,y)<d(x,z)+d(z,y).
   As we shall see, these metrics are constructed from a Green function. 2000, Lutz Habermann, Riemannian Metrics of Constant Mass and Moduli Spaces of Conformal Structures
3. (mathematics) A metric tensor.
4. Abbreviation of metric system.

verb

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.