distort

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

• (General American) IPA^(key): /dɪˈstɔɹt/
• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /dɪˈstɔːt/

  • Audio (Southern England)

    (file)

• Rhymes: -ɔː(ɹ)t

distort (third-person singular simple present distorts, present participle distorting, simple past and past participle distorted)

1. (transitive) To bring something out of shape, to misshape.
   • 1902, Hilaire Belloc, The Path to Rome:

     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.

2. (intransitive, ergative) To become misshapen.
3. (transitive) To give a false or misleading account of

   In their articles, journalists sometimes distort the truth.

• (to bring something out of shape): deform

• distorter

• distorted (adjective)
• distortion

distort (comparative more distort, superlative most distort)

1. (obsolete) Distorted; misshapen.
   • 1596, Edmund Spenser, “Book V, Canto XII”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, stanza 36:

     Her face was ugly and her mouth distort.