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It's so easy to talk about "deciles" as if they were groups of observations that fall between the actual deciles, i.e., "any of the nine values that divide the sorted data into ten equal parts." But that raises the question, what are the names of those parts?

To make this less subjective, I am requesting notable instances where bins derived from quantiles have been named in literature. What were they called?

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    $\begingroup$ Sometimes people try to make fine distinctions e.g. that the bin above the upper quartile is the top quarter, but these distinctions are being swamped by a widespread conflation of quantile as point and quantile as bin or interval, e.g. in economics. A defence is that we don't really need two terminologies. $\endgroup$
    – Nick Cox
    Commented Feb 19, 2019 at 18:39
  • $\begingroup$ @Nick Cox, for years I've been feeling pain every time I've used a quantile's name to refer to a bin. Thanks to your linked answer, I'm going to try to do it without feeling bad next time! $\endgroup$
    – Ben Ogorek
    Commented Feb 20, 2019 at 1:45
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    $\begingroup$ I post frequently on Statalist and see this usage often there, usually from people in economics, business and finance. I feel often that it's a tide I surely can't turn myself. Language changes, and I stopped fighting "data is" when I found myself saying it. I still can't stand "I have a data". But I recommend in discussion "quintile bin", "decile bin", and so forth to keep up the right kind of signal. Historically quantiles are points! $\endgroup$
    – Nick Cox
    Commented Feb 20, 2019 at 6:56

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