distort

verb, adj — 4 senses

distort

verb

UK /dɪsˈtɔːt/ · CA, US /dɪsˈtoɹt/

Etymology Borrowed from Latin distortum, past participle of distorqueō (“to twist, torture, distort”).

1

To bring something out of shape, to misshape.

This she did with the utmost politeness, though cold by race, and through her politeness ran a sense of what the Teutons call Duty, which would once have repelled me; but I have wandered over a great part of the world and I know it now to be a distorted kind of virtue.1902, Hilaire Belloc, The Path to Rome:

2

Ergative To become misshapen.

3

To give a false or misleading account of; pervert.

In their articles, journalists sometimes distort the truth.

Synonyms: deform
Derived terms: distortable, distorter, distortive, undistort
Related terms: distorted, distortion

distort

adj

Etymology Borrowed from Latin distortum, past participle of distorqueō (“to twist, torture, distort”).

1

Obsolete Distorted; misshapen.

Her face was ugly and her mouth distort.1596, Edmund Spenser, “Book V, Canto XII”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, stanza 36:

Entry derived from the Wiktionary, under licence CC BY-SA 4.0 — list of authors.

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Conjugation of “distort”, all tenses