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distort
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
distort
verb
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
a distorted/misleading picture (=one that is not accurate)
▪ The media coverage left many people with a distorted picture.
▪ These figures give a misleading picture of the company’s financial health.
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADVERB
often
▪ Isolated and often distorted in size, objects are fetishised and appear surreal.
▪ But the attacks often distort the true nature of a candidate.
▪ It may be very colloquial and the voices are often distorted.
▪ Gone, in the heat of a passion as debilitating as the panic that so often distorts the actions of accused politicians.
▪ Crime rates often distort more than they clarify.
▪ It does not necessarily call for an ethical content, so facts are often distorted or falsified for self-interest.
seriously
▪ Too much emotion has been bottled up for too long and in some firms the performance-reward link is seriously distorted.
▪ This is a seriously distorted impression.
■ NOUN
face
▪ The candles fluttered light on to the silver, which threw off distorted images of the faces round the table.
▪ The fierce, distorted blind face of the creature appeared at ground level, on its side, searching.
▪ It not only distorts the face but gives the impression of anger or impatience.
▪ Some of them have really distorted faces.
fact
▪ Members of all three shifts were milling about the circular room: repeating rumours, distorting facts and generally hyping themselves up.
▪ The Department of the Environment immediately issued a furious press release accusing the Chron of distorting the facts.
▪ Take cheap shots and distort facts in order to get ahead?
▪ Obesity researchers' thinking is distorted most by the fact that almost everyone who funds their work is in the diet business.
market
▪ From that it follows that any tax, because it distorts the market, must be bad.
▪ They supply most of the pubs and they distort the market as a result of their sheer size and advertising wealth.
▪ None of this is likely to change the dynamics of stadium-bidding, as long as the sports-league cartels distort the market.
▪ If these taxes increase the price of all products in proportion to their original price, they distort market preferences relatively little. 2.
relationship
▪ The denial mechanisms will distort relationships and dealings with the client, and warp our perceptions of the whole situation.
truth
▪ Perceptions, such as hers, distort the truth and confuse the issue.
▪ Champions of the vanquished classes, at home and abroad, would inevitably seek to distort the truth.
▪ Hutcheson over-simplified and distorted the truth by treating benevolence as the one moral desideratum.
■ VERB
become
▪ A natural and innocent experience like weeping becomes sullied and distorted.
▪ The engram bank becomes severely distorted by painful emotion and the areas of painful emotion be-come severely distorted by physical pain elsewhere.
▪ The protein becomes distorted and loses its function.
▪ It takes imagination to understand what is needed when sounds become muffled, distorted, unclear or even non-existent.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ Funhouse mirrors, which are not flat, cause images to be distorted.
▪ Journalists were accused of sensationalizing the story and distorting the facts.
▪ Newspaper readers are usually given a simplified and often distorted version of events.
▪ Some say that the President has distorted facts in order to win the election.
▪ These incidents were grossly distorted by police witnesses.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ A frequent tactic is to try to distort the meaning of words.
▪ But ions can not probe non-conductors because they build up a charge on the surface, which distorts the analysis.
▪ But we can not assume that humans would naturally or inevitably develop such distorted ideas.
▪ For example, the beat can be distorted if the coronary arteries are not wired correctly inside the heart.
▪ If the sine wave is distorted, harmonics are generated.
▪ Nevertheless, to conceive of parents as utterly static in the child's psychological life is likely to distort the picture grossly.
▪ The engram bank becomes severely distorted by painful emotion and the areas of painful emotion be-come severely distorted by physical pain elsewhere.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Distort

Distort \Dis*tort"\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Distorted; p. pr. & vb. n. Distorting.]

  1. To twist of natural or regular shape; to twist aside physically; as, to distort the limbs, or the body.

    Whose face was distorted with pain.
    --Thackeray.

  2. To force or put out of the true posture or direction; to twist aside mentally or morally.

    Wrath and malice, envy and revenge, do darken and distort the understandings of men.
    --Tillotson.

  3. To wrest from the true meaning; to pervert; as, to distort passages of Scripture, or their meaning.

    Syn: To twist; wrest; deform; pervert.

Distort

Distort \Dis*tort"\, a. [L. distortus, p. p. of distorquere to twist, distort; dis- + torquere to twist. See Torsion.] Distorted; misshapen. [Obs.]

Her face was ugly and her mouth distort.
--Spenser.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
distort

1580s, from Latin distortus, past participle of distorquere "to twist different ways, distort," from dis- "completely" + torquere "to twist" (see torque (n.)). Related: Distorted; distorting.

Wiktionary
distort

  1. (context obsolete English) distorted; misshapen v

  2. 1 (context transitive English) To bring something out of shape, to misshape. 2 (context intransitive ergative English) To become misshapen. 3 (context transitive English) To give a false or misleading account of

WordNet
distort

  1. v. make false by mutilation or addition; as of a message or story [syn: falsify, garble, warp]

  2. form into a spiral shape; "The cord is all twisted" [syn: twist, twine] [ant: untwist]

  3. twist and press out of shape [syn: contort, deform, wring]

  4. affect as in thought or feeling; "My personal feelings color my judgment in this case"; "The sadness tinged his life" [syn: tinge, color, colour]

  5. alter the shape of (something) by stress; "His body was deformed by leprosy" [syn: deform, strain]

Related phrases:
Wikipedia
Distort (album)

Distort was the second release and first remix album by Darkwave duo Collide which has been out of print for some time. However recently the album has been brought back in stock with a few more tracks and has undergone some more studio remixing and remastering for the 2006 release.

Distort (disambiguation)

To distort is to alter the original shape of an object, image, sound, waveform or other form of information or representation.

Distort may also refer to:

  • Distort (album), a 1998 industrial album
  • Distort Entertainment, a record label

Usage examples of "distort".

His face, with the distorted, swollen features of an acromegalic, turned incuriously to look in their direction.

Placing the ampule back over the burner, the glass became soft again, but as he tried to rotate it, the molten glass distorted more, and he only succeeded in burning himself and making a mess of the whole end of the ampule.

Had earthquakes shaken the windows atilt so they mirrored intruders with distorted gleams and glares?

After that, they become atretic, or scarred and distorted from repeated ovulations.

The sliding panels had been either cut away or hammered back in their distorted grooves, where they had rusted fast, and now the openings were screened with panels of basketwork or animal-hides draped like curtains.

Then the distorted Effigy shot up into the blueshifted sky and arced down over the edge of the cliff, hurling itself after the misty water into the flickering crimson of the plain below.

Cover those distort knobs on your head and buy two bluesteel cork-grip stilettos and offer to pay for them with a bag of sassafras.

It removed the mask and smiled, its human lips stretching wide as chelicera and pedipalpi extended and distorted the lower half of its face.

He conducts all manner of experiments with substances which distort reality, has done for years.

Moreover, the effects were diffused over many messages, commingled with other sources of information, distorted by Nazi preconceptions, so that it was virtually impossible to single out cryptanalyzed information as critical in a specific event.

Contacting the deeper meaning is a liberation from the false and distorted surface meaning, and this liberation is experienced as type of freedom from a prior suffering or constraint.

And to have the picture of our impression complete, you must bear in mind that we saw it all through a thick bent glass, distorting it as things are distorted by a lens, acute only in the centre of the picture, and very bright there, and towards the edges magnified and unreal.

It was an insanely complicated problem, because he had to take into account a quantum twitch in Einsteinian time contraction as the black hole collapsed into existence from a somewhat larger mass, and because the relativistic speed at which the hole was traveling distorted space itself, making a sort of furrow along an Einsteinian geodesic.

A decade later, he changed the history of the art world with the birth of Fauvism exuberant colors and wildly distorted shapes.

Descendants: and all nations preserved the remembrance of that division of the human family into the righteous and impious, in their distorted legends of the wars between the Gods, and the Giants and Titans.