Skew
Etymology
From Old North French “eskiuwer” (to shun or avoid), a relative of “eschew,” which shifted toward the sense of slanting or going obliquely. Karl Pearson formalized “skewness” as a statistical measure of asymmetry around 1900.
noun · /SKYOO/
The asymmetry of a distribution, where values trail off farther on one side than the other.
What it names
It explains why the average and the typical case part ways — the reason “average” can be an honest lie.
Example
Income is right-skewed: a long tail of high earners pulls the mean above the median, so most people earn less than the “average.”
Related idea
Skew is exactly why the mean and median diverge; in a symmetric normal distribution skew is zero, but in real economic data it is often large and always worth checking.