Word.ws English Dictionary

distorting

distorting is the present participle and gerund of distort.

Meaning of distort

Verb

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.
    • 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
    Synonyms:
    deform
  2. (ergative, intransitive) To become misshapen.
  3. (transitive) To give a false or misleading account of; pervert.
    • In their articles, journalists sometimes distort the truth.
    Synonyms:
    skew

See all 4 meanings of distort

Adjective

distorting (comparative more distorting, superlative most distorting)

  1. That distorts.
    • It's like looking in a distorting mirror at the fair.2001, Karel Jan Vollers, Twist & build: creating non-orthogonal architecture, page 86
    • However, the procedure has been applied only to those below the threshold and who might move up, and not to those just above, who might move down. This has had a very distorting effect on the distributions.2008, House of Commons: Children, Schools and Families Committee, “Cambridge Assessment”, in Testing and Assessment: Oral and written evidence, volume 2, page 215

Forms of distorting

comparativemore distorting
superlativemost distorting

Words formed from distorting

Phrases with distorting

Questions about distorting

What does distorting mean?
Distorting means that distorts.
What is distorting the present participle and gerund of?
Distorting is the present participle and gerund of distort.
What part of speech is distorting?
Distorting is an adjective.

Words near distorting in the dictionary

  1. distorted
  2. distortedly
  3. distortedness
  4. distorter
  5. distorters
  6. distorting
  7. distorting mirror
  8. distorting mirrors
  9. distortion
  10. distortional
  11. distortionary

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: distorting (page history and authors); distort (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “distorting.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/distorting. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.