Measures of Scale

https://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/eda/section3/eda356.htm

Scale, Variability, or Spread A fundamental task in many statistical analyses is to characterize the spread, or variability, of a data set. Measures of scale are simply attempts to estimate this variability.
When assessing the variability of a data set, there are two key components:

How spread out are the data values near the center?
How spread out are the tails?
Different numerical summaries will give different weight to these two elements. The choice of scale estimator is often driven by which of these components you want to emphasize.
The histogram is an effective graphical technique for showing both of these components of the spread.

Definitions of Variability For univariate data, there are several common numerical measures of the spread:
variance - the variance is defined as
s2=∑Ni=1(Yi−Y¯)2/(N−1)
where Y¯ is the mean of the data.

The variance is roughly the arithmetic average of the squared distance from the mean. Squaring the distance from the mean has the effect of giving greater weight to values that are further from the mean. For example, a point 2 units from the mean adds 4 to the above sum while a point 10 units from the mean adds 100 to the sum. Although the variance is intended to be an overall measure of spread, it can be greatly affected by the tail behavior.

standard deviation - the standard deviation is the square root of the variance. That is,
s=∑Ni=1(Yi−Y¯)2/(N−1)−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−√
The standard deviation restores the units of the spread to the original data units (the variance squares the units).

range - the range is the largest value minus the smallest value in a data set. Note that this measure is based only on the lowest and highest extreme values in the sample. The spread near the center of the data is not captured at all.

average absolu