The mode is a statistical measure of central tendency that represents the number or value that appears most often in a given set of data. In other words, it is the most frequent observation in a distribution. The mode can be a helpful way of portraying central tendency, particularly for categorical data or when a dataset has a clear peak or concentration of values. A dataset can have one mode (unimodal), more than one mode (bimodal or multimodal), or no mode if all values occur with the same frequency. For example, in a survey asking about preferred colors, the mode would be the color that was chosen by the largest number of respondents. While the mode is easy to identify, it may not always be a unique or stable measure of central tendency, especially in small datasets or those with a wide range of values.