Shape of a distribution

Shape is what you can see before computing anything: whether the graph is roughly symmetric or has a longer tail on one side, and whether it has one peak, two peaks, or none. You name the skew after the side the longer tail points to, so a stretched-out right tail means skewed right. A histogram of home sale prices in one town usually climbs fast, peaks near the low end, and trails off toward a few expensive houses, which you would describe as unimodal and skewed right. Shape then drives the rest of your description, because it decides whether you summarize with the mean and standard deviation or with the median and IQR.