a. [ad. L. aberrant-em, pr. pple. of aberrā-re. See ABERR.]
1. lit. Wandering away or straying from a defined path; hence fig. diverging or deviating from any moral standard.
1848. Kingsley, Saint’s Trag. (1878), IV. ii. 123. Such a choice must argue Aberrant senses, or degenerate blood.
1864. Cockran, trans. Pressensé’s Reply to Renan, 83. People see in it the signs of a diseased, aberrant genius.
2. Deviating widely from the ordinary or natural type, exceptional, irregular, abnormal; especially in Nat. Hist.
1830. Lyell, Princ. Geol. (1875), II. III. xxxvii. 322. If there be such proneness in each aberrant form to merge into the normal type.
1835. Kirby, Habits & Inst. An., II. xvi. 74. The usual oral organs, though a little aberrant in their structure.
1839. Hallam, Lit. Eur., I. viii. § 28. These aberrant lines are much more common in the dramatic blank verse of the seventeenth century.
1857. H. Miller, Sch. & Schoolm., viii. 167. His mother, though of a devout family of the old Scottish type, was an aberrant specimen.
1878. M. Foster, Physiology, IV. v. 560. The events are much more characteristic in the typical female than in the aberrant male.
1881. Westcott & Hort, N. T. in Greek, II. 240. It would be … difficult to derive the neutral reading from any coalescence of the aberrant readings.
