Definition of "aberrate" in English

verb

1. (intransitive) To go astray; to diverge; to deviate (from); deviate from.

   • 1765, Peter Dollond, letter to James Short dated 7 February, 1765, in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Volume 55, London, 1766, p. 55, […] the surfaces of the concave lens may be so proportioned as to aberrate exactly equal to the convex lens, near the axis […]
   • 1839, Thomas De Quincey, “Lake Reminiscences: No. V, Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge” originally published in Tait’s Magazine, August 1839, in David Masson (editor), The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, London: A. & C. Black, 1896, Volume 2, Chapter 5, pp. 340-341, […] the barriers, which to them limit the view, and give to it, together with the contraction, all the distinctness and definite outline of limitation, are, in nine cases out of ten, the product of their own defective and aberrating vision, and not real barriers at all.

2. (transitive) To distort; to cause aberration of.

   • 1893, Bret Harte, Sally Dows, Chapter 6, in Sally Dows and Other Stories, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, p. 104, He saw them through no aberrating mist of tenderness or expediency—but with the single directness of the man of action.
   • 1950, Louis S. London, Sexual Deviations, cited in reviews in Time, 17 April, 1950 (“Medicine: The Abnormal”) and Journal of the Indiana State Medical Association, Volume 43, August, 1950, p. 802, […] sexually aberrated individuals can be treated most successfully via the method of psycho-analytic psychotherapy.