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deviate

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary

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English

Pronunciation

Verb
Noun and Adjective

Etymology 1

From Late Latin dēviātus, perfect passive participle of dēviō, see -ate (verb-forming suffix) for more. Compare French dévier.

Verb

deviate (third-person singular simple present deviates, present participle deviating, simple past and past participle deviated)

  1. (intransitive) To go off course from; to change course; to change plans.
    • 1749, Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling:
      These two circumstances, however, happening both unfortunately to intervene, our travellers deviated into a much less frequented track; and after riding full six miles, instead of arriving at the stately spires of Coventry, they found themselves still in a very dirty lane, where they saw no symptoms of approaching the suburbs of a large city.
    • 1711 May, [Alexander Pope], An Essay on Criticism, London: […] W[illiam] Lewis […]; and sold by W[illiam] Taylor […], T[homas] Osborn[e] […], and J[ohn] Graves […], →OCLC:
      Thus Pegasus, a nearer way to take, / May boldly deviate from the common track.
  2. (intransitive, figurative) To fall outside of, or part from, some norm; to stray.
    His exhibition of nude paintings deviated from the norm.
    • 2021 February 9, “The double-edged sword of movie stardom remains the same as it ever was: when a persona is so fixed in the public mind, it's what people love you for, and it becomes difficult to deviate from.”, in BBC‎:
  3. (transitive) To cause to diverge.
Synonyms
Derived terms
Translations

Etymology 2

From a substantivation of Late Latin dēviātus, see Etymology 1 and -ate (noun-forming suffix) for more.

Noun

deviate (plural deviates)

  1. (sociology) A person with deviant behaviour; a deviant, degenerate or pervert.
    Synonyms: deviant, degenerate, pervert
    • 1915, James Cornelius Wilson, A Handbook of medical diagnosis‎:
      […] Walton has suggested that it is desirable "to name the phenomena signs of deviation, and call their possessors deviates or a deviate as the case may be […]
    • 1959, Leon Festinger, Stanley Schachter, Kurt W. Back, Social Pressures in Informal Groups: A Study of Human Factors in Housing‎:
      Under these conditions the person who appears as a deviate is a deviate only because we have chosen, somewhat arbitrarily, to call him a member of the court […]
    • 2001, Rupert Brown, Group Processes‎:
      […] The second confederate was also to be a deviate initially […]
  2. (statistics) A value equal to the difference between a measured variable factor and a fixed or algorithmic reference value.
    • 1928, Karl J. Holzinger, Statistical Methods for Students in Education‎:
      It will be noted that for a deviate x = 1.5, the ordinate z will have the value .130 […]
    • 2001, Sanjeev B. Sarmukaddam, Indrayan Indrayan, Abhaya Indrayan, Medical Biostatistics‎:
      This difference is called a deviate. When a deviate is divided by its SD a, it is called a relative deviate or a standard deviate.
    • 2005, Michael J. Crawley, Statistics: An Introduction Using R‎:
      This is a deviate so the appropriate function is qt. We need to supply it with the probability (in this case p = 0.975) and the degrees of freedom...
Translations
The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout § Translations.
Translations to be checked

Etymology 3

From Late Latin dēviātus, see Etymology 1 and -ate (adjective-forming suffix) for more.

Adjective

deviate

  1. (sociology) deviant
    • 1987 February 1, Kim Westheimer, quoting John Gillespie, “Rawhide Boys”, in Gay Community News, volume 14, number 28, page 2:
      It's somewhat in vogue to give special attention and consideration to the alternative lifestyle, which five years ago we would have called the deviate lifestyle.
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Italian

Verb

deviate

  1. second-person plural present present subjunctive/imperative of deviare

Anagrams

Latin

Verb

dēviāte

  1. second-person plural present active imperative of dēviō

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