How to Use deviant in a Sentence

deviant

1 of 2 adjective
  • But the idea of using the military to crush protests used to seem deviant, too.
    Masha Gessen, The New Yorker, 24 June 2020
  • Snowflake yeasts have their own way of purging themselves of deviant cells.
    Elizabeth Pennisi, Science | AAAS, 28 June 2018
  • He was bred with his daughter to produce more white tigers, and his deviant blood still courses through the veins of many of the cats today.
    Chris Jones, The Atlantic, 13 Oct. 2022
  • Oh, and the deviant kingpin of them all, the murderous Aaron Hernandez.
    Kevin Paul Dupont, BostonGlobe.com, 12 Nov. 2022
  • And, with each re-telling, the teeth get sharper, the snarling pre-meditation more deviant, the demonic grin wider.
    SI.com, 4 Oct. 2019
  • Black-haired putti, prying and vaguely deviant, swarmed around her.
    Aatish Taseer Richard Mosse, New York Times, 3 Nov. 2022
  • The beast in Qiu Miaojin’s modernist novels is the consciousness in women that is aware of a deviant lust for women’s bodies.
    Ankita Chakraborty, Longreads, 8 June 2018
  • While all this was going on, there was one delightfully deviant coach.
    Bob Ryan, BostonGlobe.com, 7 Jan. 2023
  • About 30 states attempt to bind electors to the winning candidate, though some of those states don’t penalize people who cast deviant votes.
    Greg Stohr, Bloomberg.com, 29 Apr. 2020
  • Deviant Artist of the Day’ will no longer necessarily feature simply artists who have pages on Deviant Art.
    John Brownlee, WIRED, 8 Feb. 2007
  • Bryne writes a gripping and suspenseful tale of Francesca and Chandler's brave efforts to take down the secret deviant society known as the Crimson Counsel.
    Maureen Lee Lenker, EW.com, 1 Apr. 2021
  • The last had a criminal history and had served time for unlawful deviant conduct.
    Jennifer Terker, CBS News, 11 Nov. 2022
  • The Moroccan team dropped to their knees in prayer, again, in the center of a new football stage where Islam was neither fringe nor marginal, deviant nor dangerous.
    Khaled A. Beydoun, CNN, 8 Dec. 2022
  • Across the nation, a small portion of these deviant kids are showing off their work on sites like Twitter, with videos posted of users stealing everything from light poles to bathroom sinks.
    Karly Williams, Chron, 16 Sep. 2021
  • This isn’t to say that all men engage in these behaviors – or that booking relatively late is a sign of deviant behavior.
    Javier D. Donna, The Conversation, 17 Feb. 2022
  • The deviant behavior acts as a catalyst for the first interaction.
    Kyle Munkittrick, Discover Magazine, 14 May 2011
  • The cause of the deviant engine activity remains unknown.
    Peter Aitken, Fox News, 16 Oct. 2021
  • Five states, including two where electors can be replaced, penalize a deviant vote.
    Peter Krouse, cleveland, 5 Oct. 2020
  • Gambhir’s revolutionary ambition was to erase the long, silent, lethal interval between the first deviant cell and a grim lab report.
    Madeline Drexler, The Atlantic, 20 Oct. 2020
  • The shoot, hanging mid-air and by a thread, is threatened by Jared’s thirst for realistic violence, and scenes begin to depict the mounting grievances and deviant obstacles.
    Holly Jones, Variety, 4 Nov. 2022
  • Offenders could be required to submit to plethysmograph testing, in which sensors are attached to their penis, in an effort to find out whether they were aroused by deviant imagery and sounds.
    Christopher N. Osher, The Denver Post, 5 Mar. 2017
  • The more density, the more aggression and deviant behavior these rodents showed one another.
    Fredrick Kunkle, Washington Post, 3 June 2017
  • Harbaugh’s style and philosophy is also a great fit for the NFL, evidenced by his pro-style spread offense, something deviant of your traditional spread.
    Jeremy Cluff, The Arizona Republic, 7 Dec. 2022
  • That the virtual world Zuckerberg wants to invent might open this Pandora’s box of deviant digitization should come as no surprise.
    Timothy Lloyd, The New Republic, 29 Nov. 2021
  • Thatcher’s government has just passed a law that stereotypes lesbians and gays as paedophiles, recruiting children for their ‘deviant’ lifestyles.
    Alex Ritman, The Hollywood Reporter, 4 May 2022
  • But unvaccinated people aren’t a random group of defectors who are trying to be deviant.
    Ed Yong, The Atlantic, 22 July 2021
  • Taken together, the accounts paint a portrait of a woman whose life appeared to revolve around finding a way to satisfy Epstein’s every whim, no matter how deviant.
    Anna Schecter, NBC News, 20 Sep. 2019
  • But these days, no matter how deviant or morally abhorrent their beliefs, people have no trouble finding soulmates on 4chan, 8chan or Telegram.
    Arie Kruglanski, The Conversation, 19 May 2022
  • Only one person can torture Wednesday's deviant brother and that's Wednesday herself.
    Chaise Sanders, Country Living, 5 Sep. 2022
  • In policy circles, the idea that black youths are deviant and deficient, an idea that shapes education, welfare and police practices today, has been fashionable for more than 50 years.
    Imani Perry, New York Times, 27 May 2016
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deviant

2 of 2 noun
  • Penelope once found the two girls in the same bed during a sleepover and called Cheryl a deviant.
    Jessica MacLeish, Teen Vogue, 8 Mar. 2018
  • Islam has blocked the path which would lead women to such a deviant lifestyle,’’ Khamenei said.
    Elisabetta Povoledo, BostonGlobe.com, 8 Mar. 2018
  • The latest potential deviant is the pea aphid , a foe to farmers and a friend to geneticists.
    Ed Yong, Discover Magazine, 18 Sep. 2012
  • The Cartel Music crew member got deviant all over this heavy tune.
    Kat Bein, Billboard, 6 June 2017
  • Being awake, truly awake, not lying in bed with my eyes scrunched closed, felt deviant.
    Amanda Shapiro, Bon Appetit, 29 May 2018
  • Paluyan’s drama Waiting for Bernau filters the country’s upheaval through the lens of a family, where the father is pro-regime and the son a deviant activist.
    Scott Roxborough, The Hollywood Reporter, 17 Feb. 2023
  • Sometimes through deviant, dark comedy, there’s a light there.
    Christina Dugan, PEOPLE.com, 9 Jan. 2018
  • The lovers’ power play serves to flesh out their compatibility, not paint them as deviants.
    TIME, 23 Oct. 2023
  • The streets of his New York are filled with rubble, leftover from a civil war between militant Christians and social deviants.
    Adi Robertson, The Verge, 2 Dec. 2018
  • As an expert on matters of the brain, the renowned neurosurgeon should have known better than to fall into the grips of a deviant with a split personality.
    Dahleen Glanton, chicagotribune.com, 6 Mar. 2018
  • This is a narrative that has been cultivated—and continues to be—to paint gay people as deviant.
    James Hamblin, The Atlantic, 30 Oct. 2017
  • Male politicians who dress up in women’s clothes are no longer called deviants but honored and celebrated as women.
    Madeleine Kearns, National Review, 26 Feb. 2023
  • The process of catching cheaters in video games is muddled in secrecy: the more developers say, the better equipped deviants are to cheat more efficiently next time around.
    Patricia Hernandez, The Verge, 24 Oct. 2018
  • In the court of public opinion, however, a large segment long ago began viewing the famed director a deviant for two reasons.
    Travis M. Andrews, chicagotribune.com, 7 Sep. 2017
  • This depiction of Biden as a lovable deviant helped shape public perception of the real-life Biden as someone fun and relatable.
    Elahe Izadi, Washington Post, 9 Mar. 2020
  • Despite such deviant behaviour by a feckless few, Bycyklen was something of a success.
    The Economist, 16 Dec. 2017
  • There is a long tradition in theatre of casting men as women who are older, stricter, meaner, fatter, louder — in other words, deviant.
    Mia J. Merrill, sun-sentinel.com, 20 Nov. 2019
  • But then again, I and my family were not libeled as traitors, crooks, deviants, and imbeciles, and put in legal jeopardy for 22 months as the media and ex-Obama officials ginned up hoax after hoax.
    Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 27 Aug. 2019
  • Kosek said the fire-suppression campaign reflects a belief, deeply rooted in the Forest Service’s history, that people who set fires in forests are deviants and evildoers.
    Wendy Melillo, The Conversation, 19 July 2019
  • Connor, meanwhile, is the Deckard character, an android whose job is to hunt other, malfunctioning androids, known as deviants.
    Andrew Webster, The Verge, 24 May 2018
  • But for almost as long as they have been portrayed, they have been characterized as socially deviant or at least responsible for their kids' troubles.
    refinery29.com, 11 May 2018
  • These portrayals were part of a system that painted African Americans as deviant and therefore deserving of subpar treatment.
    P.r. Lockhart, Vox, 24 Oct. 2018
  • But these incidents also may point to something else — like the desire to preserve racial hierarchies by casting people of color as deviants that can be removed at any moment.
    P.r. Lockhart, Vox, 2 July 2018
  • Paduch took advantage of his victims for his own deviant satisfaction.
    Audrey Conklin, Fox News, 11 Apr. 2023
  • Prince Prospero, cordially invites you to his deviant masquerade, far from the pestilence of the outside world, to revel in safety and depravity within his illustrious halls.
    Matthew J. Palm, OrlandoSentinel.com, 21 May 2017
  • But these incidents may also point to something else — like a more explicit desire to preserve racial hierarchies by casting people of color as deviants who can be removed at any moment.
    P.r. Lockhart, Vox, 1 Aug. 2018
  • When justice is sought in the wake of a scam, skepticism is positioned as the norm, while gullibility is treated as a maladaptive, pathological, deviant form of socioeconomic being.
    Hannah Zeavin, Harper's Magazine, 15 June 2022
  • Women’s magazines and news outlets depict women who vote Republican as deviants.
    Carrie Lukas, WSJ, 12 Dec. 2018
  • These communities were also more likely to believe in outdated stereotypes, like all cannabis users are lazy, dangerous, deviant or unintelligent.
    Niklas Kouparanis, Rolling Stone, 26 July 2023
  • With its high of 79 degrees, Saturday did not seem like a species of meteorological deviant, to be savored only in spots habitually visited by sunshine.
    Martin Weil, Washington Post, 6 Nov. 2022

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'deviant.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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