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Aberrant   Listen
adjective
Aberrant  adj.  
1.
Wandering; straying from the right way.
2.
(Biol.) Deviating from the ordinary or natural type; exceptional; abnormal. "The more aberrant any form is, the greater must have been the number of connecting forms which, on my theory, have been exterminated."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Aberrant" Quotes from Famous Books



... included Armados among them, they numbered also their Birons and Rosalines. Though Lyly practised exuberances of verbal jugglery, he was not their inventor; they were a vice of the times, largely borrowed from foreign models; and Shakespeare himself, in moments of aberrant ingenuity, produced—not for laughter—samples which Lyly might have admired but could never ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes

... series of finished pencil-drawings, which, as works of art and accurate delineations of fact, are among the most finished productions of his hand. In the same manner his contemplated work upon the Vertebrata led him during 1879-1880 to renewed investigation of the anatomy of some of the more aberrant orders. Especially as concerning the Marsupialia and Edentata was this the case, and to the end in view he secured living specimens of the Vulpine Phalanger, and purchased of the Zoological Society the Sloths ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley

... into Balanoglossus, the worm; of the Cercaria-form larva of Distoma; of the Pilidium-form larva of Nemertes; and the larval forms of the leeches;[25] as well as the mite Pentastomum, and certain other aberrant ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard

... Mr. Robert Collyer, rector of Warham, a living close to Holkham in the gift of my brother Leicester. Between my Ely tutor and myself there was but little sympathy. He was a man of much refinement, but with not much indulgence for such aberrant proclivities as mine. Without my knowledge, he wrote to Mr. Ellice lamenting my secret recusancy, and its moral dangers. Mr. Ellice came expressly from London, and stayed a night at Ely. He dined with us in the cloisters, and had a long private conversation with my tutor, and, before he left, with ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke

... is the antagonism of the soul with God. But the perpetual preservation of a perfectly balanced antagonism with God is inconceivable. It must vary, totter, grow either worse or better. If it grows worse, it will finally destroy itself, the aberrant individuality or malign insurgence vanishing in the totality of force, as the filth of our sewers vanishes purely in the purity of the ocean. If it grows better, its improvement will finally transform the opposition into reconciliation, the evil disappearing in ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... one eye-witness even subsequently described their carriage as "brazen." Mr. Lewisham was wearing his mortarboard cap of office—there was no mistaking him. They passed the Proprietary School and saw a yellow picture framed and glazed, of Mr. Bonover taking duty for his aberrant assistant master. And outside the Frobisher house ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells

... feet). An aberrant group of the Gasteropods, in which the foot is modified so as to ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson

... their offspring advanced to this regal state of manhood, while all other pairs have remained stationary, or precisely where they were two hundred and fifty thousand years ago or more? Why this exceptional divergence in the case of a single pair of monkeys? Why this anomalous, aberrant, and thoroughly eccentric movement on the part of nature? We had supposed that her operations were uniform—conformable to fixed laws of movement. The doctrine of the "survival of the fittest" implies this. Why then, should nature, in her unerring operations, have selected the fittest in respect ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright

... found vent in most vigorous and unmistakeable language; dogmatic obiter dicta came from his mouth or his pen like so many cudgel-thwacks. His nature was tense and intense, very excitable and subject to aberrant moods—and he was often the victim of a false ply, as the French would say. It cannot be gainsaid that his suspicions of society ways, and of ordinarily conventional literary men, often betrayed him into tactless discourtesies. ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper

... ideas exists upon this subject, largely due to a loose application of the term disease. Strictly speaking, this term is only applicable to that which shows the health of the plant to be impaired. It should be distinguished from aberrant or abnormal forms, for these are not necessarily indicative of disease. Nobody thinks of saying that red or striped roses are diseased because they are departures in color from the white flower of the type species; or that white, yellow, or striped roses are diseased ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various

... the phenomena of sleep, dreams, swoons, and death. Belief in the influence of these doubles of the dead on the fortunes of the living leads to sorcery, prayer, and praise. Ancestor-worship is the ultimate source of all forms of religion; to it can be traced even such aberrant developments as fetichism and idolatry, animal-, plant-, and nature-worship. Thus the primitive man feels himself related not only to his living fellows, but to multitudes of supernatural beings about him. The fear of the living becomes the root of the ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg

... not know. I cogitated and recogitated, and came to no conclusion as to how I should act; only I saw no great benefit in the meantime in endeavouring to make any use of the pamphlet for the purpose of recovering the aberrant reason of the poor lady. At length I fell asleep, and next morning awoke to the strange recollections of what had occurred so shortly before. I saw Amelia again; she was depressed and moody; the fiend within her was dormant, but its weight pressed on the ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various



Words linked to "Aberrant" :   aberrance, aberrate, deviant, abnormal, unusual person, deviate, aberrancy



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