What the words on this site mean. Most of these are technical terms from demography or epidemiology, defined here in the plainest version that's still correct. Where a measure has both a real name and a common one — "adult mortality" and "the fifteen-to-sixty rate" — we list both. Where we lean on a specific definition (whose age structure, which standard population, which denominator), we say so.
The probability that a 15-year-old dies before their 60th birthday, reported per 1,000 people. Sometimes called the "fifteen-to-sixty" rate. Unlike the crude death rate, it doesn't shift with how old or young a country is — it asks the same question of every population. We carry it separately for men and women; the gap between the two is the male mortality penalty.
The crude death rate, reweighted onto a single standard age structure so countries with very different age profiles can be compared fairly. Two countries can have the same underlying mortality but very different crude rates if one is full of pensioners and the other full of children; age-standardizing strips that out. Our ASDR uses the WHO World Standard Population (Ahmad et al., 2001) and is sourced from the WHO Global Health Observatory.
The share of a population at each age. A country with lots of children and few old people has a young age structure; one with lots of pensioners has an old one. Most cross-country differences in the crude death rate are differences in age structure rather than in mortality risk — which is why we keep both the raw rate and the age-standardized version on the site.
The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, which operates Australia's own National Death Index — a restricted, researcher-only system that links research cohorts to individual death certificates inside Australia. That is not this site. We share a name with the AIHW's tool by accident and have no records on individuals.
Litres of pure alcohol per adult aged 15 or over, as reported by national tax and trade authorities. The word "recorded" is doing real work: home-distilled spirits, smuggled bottles, and informal-economy alcohol are not in the figure, and in some heavy-drinking countries that hidden share is large. So the published number is a lower bound, not the whole drink.
A death distribution with two peaks rather than one. In the poorest countries deaths cluster in infancy and again in old age, producing two humps; as countries get richer the first peak shrinks and the curve becomes a single late hump. See the shape of death to switch between countries and watch the curve change.
Weight in kilograms divided by height in metres squared. The World Health Organization treats a BMI of 30 or more as obesity, and the obesity-prevalence figures on this site use that threshold. BMI is a rough screening tool, not a diagnostic — it can't tell muscle from fat — but it's the comparable measure most countries collect.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and its statistical arm the National Center for Health Statistics. They operate the original "National Death Index" — a restricted database used by approved researchers to match study participants to US death-certificate records. That tool identifies individuals; this site does not. The two share a name, nothing more.
The small network of free, public, raw-data reference sites that the National Death Index belongs to. The unifying idea: take public figures, organize them honestly by country, rank them, cite the source, and stop. See clayindices.com for the others.
A toggle in the console that plots a measure for men on one axis and for women on the other, with a 45° identity line drawn through the chart. Points above the line are countries where the female value is higher; points below, where the male value is. In adult-mortality comparison mode, every country sits on the male-higher side of the line, with no exceptions.
When a third variable distorts the relationship between two others. The clearest example on this site: the crude death rate looks like a measure of mortality risk, but most of the variation across countries is really age structure. Age is the confound. We try to flag confounds on the page rather than bury them.
The two-axis scatter tool at /console/. Pick any measure for the horizontal axis, any measure for the vertical axis, and the console plots every country with both numbers, computes the correlation, and lets you switch the death rate between raw and age-standardized. It's the most flexible view of the underlying data.
A number between −1 and +1 that summarizes the strength and direction of the linear relationship between two measures. An r near +1 means the two move together; near −1, they move in opposite directions; near 0, they don't move together at all. We label values above 0.7 as strong, 0.4–0.7 as moderate, and below 0.2 as little to none. Correlation is not causation, and we say so once, plainly, in the footer rather than hedging every sentence.
Comparing the most recent value for each country at one moment, rather than tracking a single country over time. It's the right tool for "where does country X stand against the world today" and the wrong one for "is country X getting better or worse." We flag the limit but lean on the snapshot because it answers the question most readers actually arrive with.
Deaths per 1,000 residents of any age in a given year. It's a real, correct fact about a society — Monaco genuinely buries about 13 people per 1,000 each year — but it counts age structure as much as mortality risk. Pack a country with pensioners and the rate climbs; pack it with young migrants and the rate falls. For the mortality-risk reading, see the age-standardized death rate.
Comma-separated values, a plain-text format that opens in any spreadsheet. Every ranking and comparison on this site has a CSV download link at the bottom of the page, with one row per country and the source year on every value.
A figure we compute at ingest rather than pull directly from the source. The life-expectancy gap (female minus male), the old-age sex ratio (men per 100 women among those 65+), military spending per capita, and obesity prevalence are all derived from underlying World Bank series. Each one is defined on the data sources page.
Gross domestic product divided by midyear population, in current US dollars. The economy's total output averaged across every resident. It's the closest single number we have to national wealth, and many of the relationships on this site — health spending, life expectancy, emissions — turn out to be partial proxies for it.
The WHO's flagship dataset of mortality, life tables and cause-of-death estimates, published in the Global Health Observatory. The age-standardized death rate and life-expectancy-at-60 figures on this site come from it. WHO refreshes the estimates roughly every other year; we update when they do.
Current health expenditure per person, in current US dollars — the sum of public and private spending divided by population. It's the cleanest cross-country money figure for health and the natural x-axis for "what does a year of life cost." See also: the spending frontier.
Current health expenditure as a share of GDP. Tracks the same spending as the per-capita measure but normalised by economic size rather than population — useful for asking how much of a country's output goes to health, which is a different question than how many dollars it spends per person.
The 45° line where y equals x, drawn through comparison-mode scatters. If every country sat on it, the male and female values would be identical everywhere. They don't — points sit consistently on one side, and that lopsidedness is what comparison mode exists to show.
The World Bank's machine-readable identifier for a data series. SP.DYN.LE00.IN is life expectancy at birth; SP.DYN.IMRT.IN is infant mortality; NY.GDP.PCAP.CD is GDP per capita. The codes are on the data sources page next to each measure, so you can trace any figure back to the World Bank API yourself.
Deaths before a first birthday, per 1,000 live births. One of the sharpest single signals of a country's development there is — clean water, vaccines, antenatal care and a trained birth attendant all show up here first.
The three-letter code used by the International Organization for Standardization to identify each country (USA for the United States, RUS for Russia, MCO for Monaco). We use them for joining records across sources, and they appear in the CSV downloads.
The most-recent non-empty value reported for each country in a given series. Different countries report on different schedules, so two rows in the same table can be stamped with different years — every row carries its own year stamp rather than being squashed onto a single date. Also called the "vintage" of the figure.
The number of years a newborn would live if today's age-specific mortality rates held for the rest of their life. It's not a forecast of how long a baby born this year will actually live — those rates will change — but a summary of how mortality looks across all ages right now, expressed as years.
The further years a 60-year-old can expect to live under current mortality. Strips out child mortality and gives a cleaner read on how a country treats its older population. Where infant mortality is high and old-age mortality is low, life expectancy at birth and life expectancy at 60 tell very different stories.
Female life expectancy at birth minus male life expectancy at birth, in years. Positive everywhere with data — women outlive men in every country we measure — and widest across the former Soviet bloc, narrowest where it never quite closes.
An actuarial table that, for each age, gives the probability of dying in the next year, the number of survivors out of a starting cohort, and the further years of life expected. The age-standardized death rate, life expectancy at 60, and the shape-of-death distribution are all built from life tables.
An axis where each evenly-spaced step is a multiplication rather than an addition: 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000. The console plots money axes on a log scale by default, because national wealth spans roughly four orders of magnitude and a linear axis would crush every poor country into the corner.
Male adult mortality minus female adult mortality, per 1,000. The size of the gap that exists in every country with data. The world's median sits around 80–100 per 1,000; in Russia and a few of its neighbours it's over 200. See the ranking.
Maternal deaths per 100,000 live births — deaths from any cause related to or aggravated by pregnancy, during pregnancy or within 42 days of its end. The spread between the safest and most dangerous countries to give birth in is among the widest in all of mortality data.
Total military expenditure divided by population gives the per-capita figure (a derived measure here), while dividing by GDP gives the share figure pulled directly from the World Bank. The two answer different questions: per capita asks how many dollars of military spending the state buys per citizen; share of GDP asks how much of the national output goes to it.
This site — a free, public, cross-national mortality reference. "National" here means comparative: data about nations, organised by nation, compared across nations. We hold no records on individuals and offer no death-certificate lookup; the US and Australian government tools that share the name do exactly the opposite. See methodology for the longer note.
A disease not passed from person to person — chronic conditions like heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes and chronic lung disease. The "big four" referenced on the premature NCD mortality ranking are heart disease, cancer, diabetes and chronic lung disease, and the measure counts deaths from any of them between ages 30 and 70.
The share of adults (aged 18 and over) with a body-mass index of 30 or more. A derived measure: the World Bank publishes male and female adult obesity separately, and we take the mean of the two. The Pacific islands top the world; the link to national wealth is real, up to a point.
Men per 100 women among those aged 65 and over. Where the number is lowest, decades of higher male mortality have thinned the ranks — it's the same fact as the male mortality penalty, told by counting the survivors instead of the deaths. A derived measure.
"Per head" — a total divided by the population. Used to put countries of very different sizes on the same footing: a billion dollars of health spending in one country is not the same per-person figure as a billion dollars in another ten times its size.
The denominator of a rate. A death rate of 8 per 1,000 means 8 deaths a year for every thousand residents. Rarer events get the larger denominator — suicide and road-traffic deaths run in the single digits per 100,000, so per 1,000 would round most of them to zero.
The share of the population aged 65 and over. Read it next to the crude death rate and the connection is hard to miss — old populations post high crude rates because death rates track grey hair.
The probability that a 30-year-old dies of heart disease, cancer, diabetes or chronic lung disease before turning 70, expressed as a percentage. Age-bounded by construction, so it doesn't suffer the age confound that bedevils the crude death rate.
The World Bank's seven-way grouping of countries by development region — Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia & Pacific, Europe & Central Asia, Latin America & Caribbean, Middle East & North Africa, North America, and South Asia. We carry the region on every ranking row so patterns within a region are easy to spot.
Deaths from road-traffic injury per 100,000 people. Pedestrians, cyclists, drivers, passengers — all causes of road-traffic death combined. WHO's figures here are usually a few years older than other indicators, because the underlying surveys are infrequent.
The chart at /shape-of-death/: out of every death in a country, what share fall in each band of age. Bimodal in the poorest countries (a peak in infancy, then a peak in old age) and a single late peak in the richest. Built from WHO life tables, so the comparison removes the effect of population size.
A model age distribution used to age-standardize death rates. By recomputing every country's mortality as if the same standard population lived there, the comparison strips out age structure. We use the WHO World Standard Population (Ahmad et al., 2001), the most widely-cited modern standard.
Age-standardized suicide deaths per 100,000 people. Presented as clinical data, ranked and sourced — see the note on sensitive topics on the contact page.
A hypothetical group of people imagined to be born at the same moment and to experience today's mortality rates throughout their lives. The synthetic cohort is the conceptual trick behind a life table and life expectancy at birth: it lets us summarize a whole population's mortality into a single year-of-life figure without waiting eighty years to find out.
The least-squares regression line drawn through a scatter to show overall direction and slope. The console draws one by default and labels its strength via Pearson's r; the comparison pages do too. A line tells you where the points point, not why.
The share of a country's population living in urban areas, as classified by the national statistical office (definitions of "urban" vary). It's one of the cleanest single proxies for industrialization and shows up in the relationship between national wealth and most mortality indicators.
The year a figure was reported. Two rows in the same table can have different vintages because countries report on different schedules; we show each one's year rather than forcing them all onto a single date. Also called the latest available year.
The World Health Organization's open data hub. We pull life tables and age-standardized rates from it, including the Global Health Estimates 2021 release. Free, no key, with full source documentation per indicator.
The free, public indicator API the site is built on. Around 200 countries, decades of history, no key required, redistributable with attribution. The spine of the National Death Index — every direct measure on the site is identified by its World Bank indicator code, which the data sources page lists.