Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- transitive verb To disturb or confuse; make uneasy or anxious.
- transitive verb To cause (a system) to become altered or imbalanced from a normal state.
- transitive verb Physics & Astronomy To cause perturbation in (the orbit of a celestial body, for example) by gravitational interaction.
from The Century Dictionary.
- To disturb greatly; agitate; disquiet.
- To disorder; confuse; cause irregularity in.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- transitive verb To disturb; to agitate; to vex; to trouble; to disquiet.
- transitive verb rare To disorder; to confuse.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- verb To
disturb ; to bother or unsettle. - verb physics To slightly modify the motion of an object.
- verb astronomy To modify the motion of a body by exerting a gravitational force.
- verb mathematics To modify slightly, such as an equation or value.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- verb disturb in mind or make uneasy or cause to be worried or alarmed
- verb throw into great confusion or disorder
- verb disturb or interfere with the usual path of an electron or atom
- verb cause a celestial body to deviate from a theoretically regular orbital motion, especially as a result of interposed or extraordinary gravitational pull
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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On the contrary, check which phone calls perturb your mental health and give you a headache.
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It was an off the cuff remark, it was not meant to "perturb" you.
The Bitch Is Back 2008
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It used to kind of perturb me the way she's say that.
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It used to kind of perturb me the way she'd say that.
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In short, true believers are much less likely to have an Aunt Susan or pal Al to perturb their unquestioning faith.
American Grace Robert D. Putnam 2010
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Nothing much, a bit of carelessness, yet enough to bring the professional wrath of Doctor Bicknell about his ears and to perturb the working of the staff and nurses for twenty-four hours to come.
SEMPER IDEM 2010
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His slightest frown might perturb them, his anger terrify them, his command compel them to certain death; yet, on the other hand, not one of them would have dreamed of addressing him otherwise than intimately by his first name, which name, "Hardman," was transmuted by their tongues into Kanaka
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Fletcher's performance highlighted a problem that must perturb Redknapp despite his insouciance – Emmanuel Adebayor seems to be going off the boil.
Adebayor goes off boil to leave Spurs short of steam against Wolves 2012
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The fact that they are unable to spend even their current budget properly doesn't perturb the bureaucrats.
Spend Better, Not More Derk Jan Eppink 2011
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In some sense, i suppose you could talk about the “stability” of the set of axioms defining your theory, i.e., how they behave if you “perturb” them — in some sense, a measure of how “robust” your chosen set of axioms is.
TrueObsession14 commented on the word perturb
Specifically, related to anxiety.
July 24, 2015