I already seem to hear cries from geometers that this isn’t at
all a weird word, but one with a specific and useful technical
meaning of a triangle having unequal sides. Mathematically
inclined or not, we all have three of them, since the word is
also applied to each of a set of three muscles that enable us to
bend our necks — they’re called that because of their irregular
triangular shapes; another name for them is scaleni, singly a
scalenus, which is the Latin word from which scalene derives.
But the origin is further back, in the Greek skalinos, uneven or
unequal. One of its rare appearances outside technical contexts
is this: Mr. Minns found himself opposite a yellow brick house
... with ‘a garden’ in front, that is to say, a small loose bit
of gravelled ground, with one round and two scalene triangular
beds, containing a fir-tree, twenty or thirty bulbs, and an
unlimited number of marigolds”. Sketches by Boz, by Charles
Dickens, 1836.