Other forms: biased, biases, biasing
Bias is a leaning — the pull toward one side that you did not choose and cannot feel from the inside. The manager who warms to every candidate from his own town. The paper that runs four stories about one party and none about the other.
The form you will meet most is biased: a biased judge, a biased sample, a biased report. Say a person is bias and it lands wrong; it is he is biased, every time. The word takes toward or against, and it brings a small family of set phrases with it — unconscious bias, confirmation bias, media bias. Dressmakers use it for something else entirely: cloth cut on the bias is cut across the diagonal of the weave, so the skirt hangs soft and stretches. And a bias is not a lie. A lie is chosen; a bias is the thumb on the scale that the owner of the thumb has never noticed.
1nounideaA leaning toward or against something that stops you judging it fairly.~69%
“The whole method was designed to keep bias out of the results.”
synonyms: prejudice, partiality
2nounbiasThe side a newspaper, a broadcaster or a study takes without admitting to it.~27%
“Readers accused the paper of bias against the strikers.”
synonyms: slant
3verbpushTo push a result or a judgement one way.~2%
“A badly worded question can bias a whole survey.”
4nounsewingIn sewing, the diagonal line across the weave of a cloth.~2%
“The skirt is cut on the bias so it falls softly.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 163 sentences found in the wild and placed 160 of them on a sense (3 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
BI-as → BUY
One shoe has a lump of iron hidden in the heel. However straight you mean to walk through the market, that foot swings you left, to the same stall, and you buy the same three apples from the same man every time.
hooks ontobuy
The first bias in English was a slanting line, borrowed around 1520 from Middle French biais — sideways, askance, against the grain. Then the game of bowls took it up: a bowl with the weight set in one side runs curved instead of straight, and that curve was its bias. Ten years later people were saying it about minds. Further back it may be Vulgar Latin biaxius, with two axes.
Vulgar Latin
*biaxius — with two axes
Old Occitan
biais
Middle French
biais
English, today
bias
c. 1520 in the sense "oblique line". As a technical term in the game of bowls c. 1560, whence the figurative use (c. 1570). From Middle French biais, adverbially ("sideways, askance, against the grain") c. 1250, as a noun ("oblique angle, slant") from the late 16th century. The French word is likely from Old Occitan biais, itself of obscure origin, most likely from Vulgar Latin biaxius (“with two axes”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA