deviate

From Late Latin deviatus, past participle of deviare, from the phrase de via.

Verb

• enPR: dē'vēāt
  • (UK) IPA^(key): /ˈdiː.vi.eɪt/

    • Audio (Southern England):

      (file)

  • (US) IPA^(key): /ˈdi.vi.eɪt/
  • (General Australian) IPA^(key): /ˈdiː.vi.æɪt/, [ˈdɪi.vi.æɪt]

Noun and Adjective

• enPR: dē'vēət
  • (UK) IPA^(key): /ˈdiː.vi.ət/

    • Audio (Southern England):

      (file)

  • (US) IPA^(key): /ˈdi.vi.ət/
  • (General Australian) IPA^(key): /ˈdiː.vi.ət/, [ˈdɪi.vi.ət]

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^[1]:
3. (transitive) To cause to diverge.

• (change course): swerve, veer
• (stray): stray, wander

• deviant
• deviation

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^[2]:

     […] 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^[3]:

     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^[4]:

     […] 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^[5]:

     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^[6]:

     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^[7]:

     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...

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.

deviate

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

• vediate, videate

dēviāte

1. second-person plural present active imperative of dēviō