Significance

An event, action, individual, or discovery is often regarded as significant when it enables or causes other changes.

Journalists, historians, scientists and many others often seek to explain why an event is significant. The question is: does the event being examined affect the "big picture"?

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In statistics, significance refers to whether a result is extreme enough to be unlikely to have arisen by chance. For details, see the entry for statistical significance.

See also: Significant figure