To distort or cause to be at an angle; to present information in a biased or misleading way. In statistics and geometry, it refers to asymmetry or deviation from a straight line or normal distribution.
From Middle English 'skewen', possibly from Old French 'eschuer' meaning to avoid or shun. The mathematical sense developed in the 19th century, while the meaning of 'bias' or 'distort' emerged in the 20th century from the geometric concept of deviation.
In statistics, a perfectly symmetrical bell curve has zero skew, but real-world data often shows skewness - like income distributions which are typically right-skewed because a few people earn extremely high amounts. This concept is crucial for understanding why median income is often lower than average income.
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