skew

UK/skjuː/US/skju/

verbC2Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #13,574 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: skewed, skewing, skews

To skew is to twist out of true, or to bias a result. Skew the figures, a skewed sample, skewed towards the young.

In statistics it is precise: a skewed distribution has a long tail on one side, which is why average income is so much higher than typical income. In ordinary use it means to distort deliberately.

Definitions of skew

1verbskewTo twist out of true, or to bias a result.C2
“A few very rich people can skew the average income of a whole town.”

skew is a distorting.

Where it comes from

Old Norman French eskiuer means to shun or move sideways, related to eschew.

Proto-Germanic
*skiuhijaną — to frighten
Frankish
*skiuhan — to dread; to avoid, shun
Old French
eschuer
fro-nor
escuer
Middle English
skeuen
English, today
skew

Built from

skewen · Middle English — to run at an angle or obliquely; to escape
eschiver · Old French — to escape, flee; to avoid
skeiv · Norwegian Nynorsk — crooked, lopsided; oblique, slanting; distorted

The verb is derived from Middle English skeuen, skewe, skewen (“to run at an angle or obliquely; to escape”), from fro-nor escuereskieuer, eskiuer, eskiuwer, eskuer, variants of Old French eschuer, eschever, eschiver (“to escape, flee; to avoid”) (modern French esquiver (“to dodge (a blow), duck; to elude, evade; to slip away; to sidestep”)), from Frankish skiuhan (“to dread; to avoid, shun”), from Proto-Germanic skiuhijaną (“to frighten”). The English word is cognate with Catalan esquiu (“evasive, shy”), Danish skæv (“crooked, slanting; skew, wry”) (> Norwegian Bokmål skjev), Dutch scheef (“crooked, slanting”), Norwegian - skeiv (“crooked, lopsided; oblique, slanting; distorted”), stq skeeuw (“aslant, slanting; oblique; awry”), and is a a doublet of eschew. The adjective and adverb are probably derived from the verb and/or from askew, and the noun is derived from either the adjective or the verb.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

skew in the wild

In linear algebra, a square matrix with complex entries is said to be skew-Hermitian or anti-Hermitian if its conjugate transpose is the negative of the original matrix.
Skew-Hermitian matrix
In dimension 1, the skew-adjoint operators are exactly the imaginary numbers, whereas real numbers correspond to self-adjoint operators.
Skew-Hermitian matrix
In three-dimensional geometry, skew lines are two lines that do not intersect and are not parallel.
Skew lines
Two lines that both lie in the same plane must either cross each other or be parallel, so skew lines can exist only in three or more dimensions.
Skew lines
A skew heap (or self-adjusting heap) is a heap data structure implemented as a binary tree.
Skew heap

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the skeiv family

askew skew

skew — used about once every 23,598 pages · #13,574 · point at the bar for the others

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