skewnessn.

1894 Philos. Trans. (Royal Soc.) A. 186 357 While their frequent skewness sufficiently indicates that the neglect of X′r + ½ as compared with a is unjustifiable.

1901 Nature 3 Oct. 569/1 The polygon with the lower mode has a skewness of +0.48.

1905 K. Pearson in Biometrika 4 173 The chief physical differences between actual frequency distributions and the Gaussian theoretical distribution are:…(ii) The ratio of this separation between mean and mode to the variability of the character—a quantity I have termed the skewness.

1935 G. K. Zipf Psycho-biol. Lang. iii. 99 The varying degrees of difficulty in the articulation of a phoneme resulting from the different combinations in which it occurs, together with the various relative frequencies of occurrences of the phoneme in its different combinations, may introduce a modification in the normal distribution of speech-sounds about the phonemic norm which, it seems, may well be termed skewness.

1936 Hereditas XXI. 330 The difference is probably not significant (the standard error could not be calculated owing to a marked skewness in both series).

1965 Language 41 189 A ‘sound system’..of a complexity and skewness out of line with anything attested by languages known to us.

1968 Economist 30 Nov. 63/1 The latest crisis..has been about the skewness of certain European currencies and not about the dollar or gold at all.

1970 Watsonia 8 124 A similar distribution of this character was found in most of the plants included in Table 1; in only four of them was the skewness more markedly positive.