Frequency distribution
In statistics, a frequency distribution is a list, table (i.e.: frequency table) or graph (i.e.: bar plot or histogram) that displays the frequency of various outcomes in a sample. Each entry in the table contains the frequency or count of the occurrences of values within a particular group or interval. Example. Here is an example of a univariate (=single variable) frequency table. The frequency of each response to a survey question is depicted. A different tabulation scheme aggregates values into bins such that each bin encompasses a range of values. For example, the heights of the students  in a class could be organized into the following frequency table. A frequency distribution shows us a summarized grouping of data divided into mutually exclusive classes and the number of occurrences in a class. It is a way of showing unorganized data notably to show results of an election, income of people for a certain region, sales of a product within a certain period, student loan amounts of graduates, etc. Some of the graphs that can be used with frequency distributions are histograms, line charts, bar charts and pie charts. Frequency distributions are used for both qualitative and quantitative data . Construction. Generally the class interval or class width is the same for all classes. The classes all taken together must cover at least the distance from the lowest value (minimum) in the data to the highest (maximum) value. Equal class intervals are preferred in frequency distribution, while unequal class intervals (for example logarithmic intervals) may be necessary in certain situations to produce a good spread of observations between the classes and avoid a large number of empty, or almost empty classes. Joint frequency distributions. Bivariate joint frequency distributions are often presented as (two-way) contingency tables: The total row and  total column report the marginal frequencies or marginal distribution, while the body of the table reports the joint frequencies. Applications. Managing and operating on frequency tabulated data is much simpler than operation on raw data. There are simple algorithms to calculate median, mean, standard deviation etc. from these tables. Statistical hypothesis testing is founded on the assessment of differences and similarities between frequency distributions. This assessment involves measures of central tendency or averages, such as the mean and median, and measures of variability or statistical dispersion, such as the standard deviation or variance. A frequency distribution is said to be  skewed when its mean and median are significantly different, or more generally when it is asymmetric. The kurtosis of a frequency distribution is a measure of the proportion of extreme values (outliers), which appear at either end of the histogram. If the distribution is more outlier-prone than the normal distribution it is said to be leptokurtic; if less outlier-prone it is said to be platykurtic. Letter frequency distributions are also used in frequency analysis to crack ciphers, and are used to compare the relative frequencies of letters in different languages and other languages are often used like Greek , Latin, etc.