Etymology Inherited from Middle English distaunt, from Old French distant, from Latin distāns.
1
Far off (physically, logically or mentally).
We heard a distant rumbling but didn't pay any more attention to it. She was surprised to find that her fiancé was a distant relative of hers. His distant look showed that he was not listening to me.
Judge Short had gone to town, and Farrar was off for a three days' cruise up the lake. I was bitterly regretting I had not gone with him when the distant notes of a coach horn reached my ear, and I descried a four-in-hand winding its way up the inn road from the direction of Mohair.1897 December (indicated as 1898), Winston Churchill, chapter IV, in The Celebrity: An Episode, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., →OCLC:
2
Emotionally unresponsive or unwilling to express genuine feelings.
Ever since our argument, she has been totally distant toward me.
3
Broadcasting, Media, Television Imported into a cable television system from a different market (and thus possibly incurring a copyright royalty).
Any determination that a particular television signal is "distant" must, of course, be made with respect to its proximity to a specific local area, which we have termed the CATV community, […]1973, Cable Television, Rand Corporation:
Finally, there will be those unusual situations where a signal is distant to part of a CATV system and local to the rest of it.1983, Gary L. Christensen, Cable Television in a New Era, page 128: