[Retric]

As a native speaker average is almost exclusively used to for mean and people specify median or mode when that’s what they are talking about. The same way people say mean without specifying arithmetic, geometric, or harmonic mean then it’s the arithmetic mean.

It’s only when someone says something like the average family rather than saying the average income when things get ambiguous. Typical on the other hand is closer to mean because it’s tossing out outliers.

[sokoloff]

I generally think of “typical” as being the median rather than the mean.

[Retric]

Ops yep, I meant median.