skew

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• intransitive verb To turn or place at an angle.
• intransitive verb To give a bias to; distort.
• intransitive verb To take an oblique course or direction.
• intransitive verb To look obliquely or sideways.
• intransitive verb To display a statistical tendency toward.
• adjective Placed or turned to one side; asymmetric.
• adjective Distorted or biased in meaning or effect.
• adjective Having a part that diverges, as in gearing.
• adjective Mathematics Neither parallel nor intersecting. Used of straight lines in space.
• adjective Statistics Not symmetrical about the mean. Used of distributions.
• noun An oblique or slanting movement, position, or direction.

from The Century Dictionary.

• To turn aside; slip or fall away; escape.
• To start aside; swerve; shy, as a horse.
• To move or go obliquely; sidle.
• To look obliquely; squint; hence, to look slightingly or suspiciously.
• To turn aside; give an oblique direction to; hence, to distort; put askew.
• To shape or form in an oblique way.
• To throw or hurl obliquely.
• To throw violently. Compare shy.
• Aslant; aslope; obliquely; awry; askew.
• Having an oblique position; oblique; turned or twisted to one side: as, a skew bridge.
• Distorted; perverted; perverse.
• In mathematics, having disturbed symmetry by certain elements being reversed on opposite sides; also, more widely, distorted.
• A casting on the end of a truss to which a tensionrod may be attached. It may form a cap, or be shaped to fit the impost.
• A carvers' chisel having the shank bent to allow the edge to reach a sunken surface.
• noun Same as scow.
• noun An obsolete variant of sky.
• noun A deviation or distortion; hence, an error; a mistake.
• noun An oblique glance; a squint.
• noun A piebald or skew-bald animal, especially a horse.
• noun A skew wheel.
• noun 5. In architecture, thn sloping top of a buttress where it slants off against a wall; a coping mounting on a slant, as that of a gable; a stone built into the base-angle of a gable, or other similar situation, to support a coping above. Compare skew-corbel, below.
• noun In mathematics, a regulus.
• noun A cup.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• adverb Awry; obliquely; askew.
• noun (Arch.) A stone at the foot of the slope of a gable, the offset of a buttress, or the like, cut with a sloping surface and with a check to receive the coping stones and retain them in place.
• transitive verb To shape or form in an oblique way; to cause to take an oblique position.
• transitive verb To throw or hurl obliquely.
• intransitive verb To walk obliquely; to go sidling; to lie or move obliquely.
• intransitive verb Prov. Eng. To start aside; to shy, as a horse.
• intransitive verb To look obliquely; to squint; hence, to look slightingly or suspiciously.
• adjective Turned or twisted to one side; situated obliquely; skewed; -- chiefly used in technical phrases.
• adjective an oblique arch. See under Oblique.
• adjective (Civil Engin.) A plate, cap, or shoe, having an inclined face to receive the nut of a diagonal brace, rod, or the end of an inclined strut, in a truss or frame.
• adjective See under Bridge, n.
• adjective (Geom.) a curve of double curvature, or a twisted curve. See Plane curve, under Curve.
• adjective (Mach.) toothed gearing, generally resembling bevel gearing, for connecting two shafts that are neither parallel nor intersecting, and in which the teeth slant across the faces of the gears.
• adjective (Geom.) a ruled surface such that in general two successive generating straight lines do not intersect; a warped surface; as, the helicoid is a skew surface.