anomaly

Meanings

1. Something that deviates from what is normal or expected.
2. A person or thing that does not fit in with its group.

Example sentences

• "The warm day in January was a weather anomaly."

  Level B2, Meaning 1

• "The results contained one anomaly that the team could not explain."

  Level B2, Meaning 1

• "As a quiet person in a loud family, he felt like an anomaly."

  Level C1, Meaning 2

• "The software flags any anomalies in the accounts."

  Level C1, Meaning 1

• "It is an anomaly that the cheapest option costs the most."

  Level C1, Meaning 1

Synonyms and antonyms

Look-alikes and common mistakes

• anonymous : Anonymous means having no name. It looks like anomaly but means something else.
• irregularity : Irregularity is a close synonym. Anomaly stresses that the thing does not fit a pattern.
• outlier : An outlier is a data point far from the rest. It is one kind of anomaly.
• abnormality : Abnormality often suggests something wrong, especially in medicine. Anomaly is more neutral.

Word family and forms

Forms: anomalies

Word partners

Words and phrases that often go with "anomaly".

• a statistical anomaly
• an anomaly in the data
• a strange anomaly
• a genetic anomaly
• an obvious anomaly
• identify an anomaly
• a weather anomaly

Origin

Anomaly comes from the Latin word anomalia, which came from Greek anomalia, meaning irregularity. The Greek word is built from anomalos, meaning uneven, which adds a negative to homalos, meaning even, from homos, meaning same. English has used anomaly since the 1500s.

Checked against: Wiktionary, the free dictionary, Dictionary.com.

How to remember it

Think of one odd sock in a drawer of matched pairs. The odd one is the anomaly.

Test yourself

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