"Freudenberger . . . leaps into the upper quartile of American novelists," the ad reads, quoting a review that ran in Salon.

Even if you were in the upper quartile of, say, Brooklyn novelists, couldn't your ranking still be as low as No. 3,407?

Our immediate objective is to move into the upper quartile and, in so doing, become one of Britain's top teaching and research universities.

The upper quartile of a standard normal distribution lies between 0.66 and 0.67 its probable error is approximately 2/3 of a standard deviation.

"I've never met a venture capitalist who wasn't in the upper quartile," Mr. Dow said.

Thus an individual item might be described as being "in the upper quartile".

The use of the term "hinge" for the lower or upper quartiles derives from John Tukey's work on exploratory data analysis, and "midhinge" is a fairly modern term dating from around that time.

For example, if and are the lower and upper quartiles respectively, then one could define an outlier to be any observation outside the range:

It ranks in the upper quartile of journals covering public, environmental, and occupational health.

The school ranked on the upper quartile among all other secondary schools in the entire country.