aberrate

verb

Etymology: From Latin aberrātus, perfect passive participle of aberrō (“wander, stray or deviate from”), formed from ab (“from, away from”) + errō (“stray”).

1. To go astray; to diverge; to deviate (from); deviate from.

   “1765, Peter Dollond, letter to James Short dated 7 February, 1765, in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Volume 55, London, 1766, p. 55, […] the surfaces of the concave lens may be so proportioned as to aberrate exactly equal to the convex lens, near the axis […]”

   “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.”

2. To distort; to cause aberration of.

   “1893, Bret Harte, Sally Dows, Chapter 6, in Sally Dows and Other Stories, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, p. 104, He saw them through no aberrating mist of tenderness or expediency—but with the single directness of the man of action.”

   “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.”