Skewness

A distribution is said to skewed to the right (left) if it shows a tailing off at the right (left). The amount of skewing can be determined by the third moment of the distribution, which is usually called skewness:

Please note that the skewness is occasionally defined by a somewhat different formula, leading to different values.

Below you find two examples of skewed distributions. You may also start the following  interactive example  in order to see the effect of skewed distributions on the mean and the median.