I am not sure I get your understanding of peakedness and heaviness. Kurtosis means "Excess" in German, so it describes the "head" or "peak" of a distribution, describing whether it is very wide or very narrow. Wikipedia states that the "peakedness" is actually described by the "kurtosis", whereas peakedness does not to appear to be a real word and you should use the term "Kurtosis". So I think you might have gotten everything right, the head is the Kurtosis, The "heaviness" of the tail might be the Skewness": Here is how you find it: $$ a_3 = \frac{\Sigma^{N}_{i=1}(x_i - \overline x)^3}{N * s^3_x} $$ with s as the standard deviation for x. The values indicate: Negative Skew: $$ a_3 < 0 $$ Positive Skew: $$ a_3 > 0 $$ No Skew $$ a_3 = 0 $$ You can get a value for the kurtosis with: $$ a_4 = \frac{\Sigma^{N}_{i=1}(x_i - \overline x)^4}{N * s^4_x} $$ The values indicate: Wide Peak: $$ a_4 < 0 $$ Narrow Peak: $$ a_4 > 0 $$ Normal Peak, so Normal Distribution $$ a_4 = 0 $$ Did that help?