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.

• noun An obsolete variant of sky.
• noun In mathematics, a regulus.
• noun A cup.
• Aslant; aslope; obliquely; awry; askew.
• noun Same as scow.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

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

• 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.
• 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.
• adjective (Alg.) a determinant in which the elements in each column of the matrix are equal to the elements of the corresponding row of the matrix with the signs changed, as in (1), below.
• transitive verb To shape or form in an oblique way; to cause to take an oblique position.
• transitive verb To throw or hurl obliquely.