In math, difference means the result you get when you subtract one number from another (it’s the answer to a subtraction problem).

What “difference” means in math

  • When you see “Find the difference between 9 and 4,” it means: do 9−49-49−4. The difference is 5.
  • More generally, the difference is “how much one number is bigger or smaller than another” on the number line.
  • In a subtraction like 15−7=815-7=815−7=8:
    • 15 is the minuend (the number you start with).
* 7 is the **subtrahend** (the number you take away).

* 8 is the **difference**.

The symbol used for taking the difference is the minus sign −-−.

Quick examples

  • “What is the difference between 12 and 5?”
    • 12−5=712-5=712−5=7, so the difference is 7.
  • “What is the difference between 20 and 20?”
    • 20−20=020-20=020−20=0, so the difference is 0.
  • On a number line, the difference between 10 and 6 is the “gap” between them, which is 4.

A tiny story to remember it

Imagine you have 10 apples and your friend has 6 apples.
If you ask, “What is the difference in how many apples we have?”, you are really asking, “How many more apples do I have than my friend?”
You do 10−610-610−6 and get 4, so the difference in apples is 4.

Common extra terms (just so you’ve seen them)

Sometimes you might hear about:

  • Absolute difference – this means you only care about the size of the gap, not which number is bigger, so it’s always positive.
  • In more advanced math, “difference” appears in phrases like difference of squares , difference quotient , or difference equation , but all of them are built around the same basic idea: something involving subtraction.

TL;DR:
In math, “difference” is the answer to a subtraction – it tells you how far apart two numbers are in quantity.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.