means To turn or swing about a vertical axis, so that a vehicle's nose veers left or right while its body stays roughly level.

from A sailor's word before it was a pilot's. 'Yaw' surfaces in the 16th century as a nautical term for a ship that wanders off course, drifting its head from side to side instead of holding a true line. Its deeper roots are murky — possibly related to Old Norse 'jaga,' to move to and fro or hunt back and forth — but the trail goes cold there. When aviation borrowed the language of the sea for its three axes — pitch, roll, and yaw — the old word for a swerving hull found new life describing a swerving nose in the sky.