The term variance refers to a measure of how spread out data values are from their mean. In other words, it is a statistical indicator that tells us how much the data points differ from each other and how close they are to the average value. A high variance indicates that there is a large difference between individual data points and the overall mean, while low variance suggests that the data points are relatively similar in size and are closer to the mean. Variance can be calculated for both numerical and categorical data, but the formulas used differ depending on the type of data being analyzed.