the standard deviation of a probability distribution, random variable, or population or multiset of values is a measure of the spread of its values. It is usually denoted with the letter σ (lower case sigma). It is defined as the square root of the variance.
To understand standard deviation, keep in mind that variance is the average of the squared differences between data points and the mean. Variance is tabulated in units squared. Standard deviation, being the square root of that quantity, therefore measures the spread of data about the mean, measured in the same units as the data.
Said more formally, the standard deviation is the root mean square (RMS) deviation of values from their arithmetic mean.
The arithmetic mean (or simply the mean) of a list of numbers is the sum of all the members of the list divided by the number of items in the list. The arithmetic mean is what students are taught very early to call the "average". If the list is a statistical population, then the mean of that population is called a population mean. If the list is a statistical sample, we call the resulting statistic a sample mean.
For example, in the population {4, 8}, the mean is 6 and the deviations from mean are {−2, 2}. Those deviations squared are {4, 4} the average of which (the variance) is 4. Therefore, the standard deviation is 2. In this case 100% of the values in the population are at one standard deviation of the mean.
