Skip to content
OneKitly

perverse

adjectivenounverbattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//pəˈvɜːs//
  • United States//pɚˈvɝs//

Turned aside while against something, splitting off from a thing.

adjective

  1. 1

    Turned aside while against something, splitting off from a thing.

    Any man who succeeds in diverting the public taste, or in turning back a perverse stream which will flow in the direction of the ditch, leaves a mark, as it were, and cannot be overlooked by posterity.

    But in the same sense are modern Nietzsche's screams against the perverse (diverted) diffusion of these elemental pleas to reason for “reasons,” for the reasons—and place—of our fall in nonsense.

    The diverted or perverse way is also not an easy path to walk. It is rightly called “crooked” and “twisting.”

  2. 2

    Morally wrong or evil; wicked; perverted.

  3. 3

    Obstinately in the wrong; stubborn; intractable.

  4. 4

    Wayward; vexing; contrary.

    [The researchers] noticed many of their pieces of [plastic marine] debris sported surface pits around two microns across.[…]Closer examination showed that some of these pits did, indeed, contain bacteria, and that in several cases these bacteria were dividing and thus, by the perverse arithmetic of biological terminology, multiplying.

    Where this perverse sign flip occurs depends on the values of other parameters […].

  5. 5

    Ignoring the evidence or the judge's opinions.

Etymology

From Middle English perverse, pervers, from Old French pervers, from Latin perversum (“thoroughly turned”), past participle of pervertere, from per- (“thoroughly”) + vertere (“to turn”).

noun

  1. 1

    archaicA chiral opposite of something; a mirror image with opposite handedness.

    If two antipodal points move continuously on the sphere, they trace out what are called symmetric figures. These figures have corresponding elements equal, and are equal in area, but are not in general superposable. The one is, in fact, the perverse of the other.

verb

  1. 1

    archaicTo pervert.

    This rule hath been always for the commodity of that kingdom, where as the powers have been thus by them perversed.

    That I have loved you My most puissant disciple I am the fabric of life and death Humanity has perversed the truth

    A second sun burst for an instant at first, Then glittered and glinted and twilight perversed And limbs limned in red quenched the sands of their thirst, The limbs of a human by all the Fates cursed;

Forms

plural
perverses
comparative
more perverse, perverser
superlative
most perverse, perversest
past tense
perversed
past participle
perversed
present participle
perversing
third person singular
perverses
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).