deviate

Etymology

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

noun

1. (sociology) A person with deviant behaviour; a deviant, degenerate or pervert.
   ...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... 1915, James Cornelius Wilson, A Handbook of medical diagnosis
   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 ... 1959, Leon Festinger, Stanley Schachter, Kurt W. Back, Social Pressures in Informal Groups: A Study of Human Factors in Housing
   ...The second confederate was also to be a deviate initially... 2001, Rupert Brown, Group Processes
2. (statistics) A value equal to the difference between a measured variable factor and a fixed or algorithmic reference value.
   It will be noted that for a deviate x = 1.5, the ordinate z will have the value .130... 1928, Karl J. Holzinger, Statistical Methods for Students in Education
   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. 2001, Sanjeev B. Sarmukaddam, Indrayan Indrayan, Abhaya Indrayan, Medical Biostatistics
   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... 2005, Michael J. Crawley, Statistics: An Introduction Using R

verb

1. (intransitive) To go off course from; to change course; to change plans.
   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. 1749, Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
2. (intransitive, figurative) To fall outside of, or part from, some norm; to stray.
   His exhibition of nude paintings deviated from the norm.
   February 9 2021, “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:
3. (transitive) To cause to diverge.