aberrate

Verb

aberrate (third-person singular simple present aberrates, present participle aberrating, simple past and past participle aberrated)

1. (intransitive) To go astray; to diverge; to deviate (from); deviate from.
   • […] the surfaces of the concave lens may be so proportioned as to aberrate exactly equal to the convex lens, near the axis […]1765, Peter Dollond, letter to James Short dated 7 February, 1765, in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Volume 55, London, 1766, p. 55
   • Such, indeed, were the primitive regulations of the greater number of monastic institutions; but the abominable and luxurious indulgences into which they afterwards aberrated, the page of history amply unfolds.1812, John Brady, Clavis Calendaria, volume I, London, page 229
2. (transitive) To distort; to cause aberration of.
   • He saw them through no aberrating mist of tenderness or expediency—but with the single directness of the man of action.1893, Bret Harte, Sally Dows, Chapter 6, in Sally Dows and Other Stories, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, p. 104
   • He and Phœbe had had a senseless quarrel […] and she had left. It was an aberrated fulfillment of her old jesting threat that if he did not behave himself she would leave him.1918, Theodore Dreiser, “The Lost Phœbe”, in Free and Other Stories, New York: Boni and Liveright, page 122