medial vs median

medial

adj
  • Pertaining to the inside; closer to the median plane of the body or the midline of an organ. 

  • Of or pertaining to the media and/or the areas of the wing next to it. 

  • (of a speech sound) In the middle of a word. 

  • Closer to the addressee. 

  • Of or pertaining to a mean or average. 

  • Pertaining to the middle layer of a blood vessel, to its tunica media. 

  • (of a consonant) Central: produced when air flows across the center of the mouth over the tongue. 

noun
  • One or more letters that occur in the middle of a word. 

  • Any of various things that occur in the middle. 

median

adj
  • In the middle of an organ, structure etc.; towards the median plane of an organ or limb. 

  • Situated in a middle, central, or intermediate part, section, or range of (something). 

  • Having the median as its value. 

noun
  • A number separating the higher half from the lower half of a data sample, population, or probability distribution. The median of a finite list of numbers can be found by arranging all the observations from lowest value to highest value and picking the middle one (e.g., the median of {3, 3, 5, 9, 11} is 5). If there is an even number of observations, then there is no single middle value; the median is then usually defined to be the mean of the two middle values. 

  • A line segment joining the vertex of triangle to the midpoint of the opposing side. 

  • The area separating two lanes of opposite-direction traffic; the median strip. 

How often have the words medial and median occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )