Word of the Day:
perturb
What It Means
To cause (something) to be physically disordered or disturbed; to cause confusion.
To disturb (someone, their mind, etc.) mentally; to bother, trouble, upset.
Of a celestial body: to modify the motion or orbit of (another celestial body) by exerting a gravitational force; hence (physics), to slightly modify (the motion of an object).
Perturb in Context
“This growth original of virgin soil, / By fascination felt in opposites, / Pleases and shocks, entices and perturbs.”
Did You Know?
From Late Middle English perturben (“to disturb (someone) mentally, disquiet; to cause disorder to (something), confuse; to hinder (something)”), from Old French perturber, and from its etymon Latin perturbāre, the present active infinitive of perturbō (“to confuse; to alarm, disturb, trouble, perturb”), from per- (intensifying prefix) + turbō (“to agitate, disturb, unsettle, perturb; to upset”) (from turba (“disorder, disturbance, turmoil”) (possibly from Ancient Greek τῠ́ρβη (tŭ́rbē, “confusion, disorder, tumult”), either from Pre-Greek, or Proto-Indo-European *(s)twerH- (“to agitate, stir up; to urge on, propel”)) + -ō (suffix forming infinitives of regular first-conjugation verbs)).
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: perturb (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “perturb.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/perturb. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.