"Dunbar's number" meaning in English

See Dunbar's number in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Proper name

Etymology: Proposed in the 1990s by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size. Head templates: {{en-proper noun}} Dunbar's number
  1. A suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 250, with a commonly used value of 150. Wikipedia link: Dunbar's number, Robin Dunbar Synonyms: Dunbar number

Download JSON data for Dunbar's number meaning in English (1.7kB)

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      "examples": [
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          "ref": "2020, Michael Wooldridge, The Road to Conscious Machines: The Story of AI, Penguin UK",
          "text": "Dunbar's number might have remained a curiosity but for the fact that subsequent research found that this number has arisen repeatedly, across the planet, in terms of actual human social group sizes.",
          "type": "quotation"
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      "glosses": [
        "A suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 250, with a commonly used value of 150."
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{
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  "synonyms": [
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      "word": "Dunbar number"
    }
  ],
  "word": "Dunbar's number"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-05 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (f4fd8c9 and c9440ce). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.