as in abnormal
departing from some accepted standard of what is normal
some studies show that many violent criminals begin exhibiting deviant behavior in early childhood
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as in maverick
a person who does not conform to generally accepted standards or customs
branded as social deviants by a society that did not value self-expression
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Examples of deviant in a Sentence
Recent Examples on the Web
Christopher R. Browning, The New York Review of Books, 1 Dec. 2022
The Florida bill’s opponents are worried about a world in which teachers have no meaningful way to discuss the real world inhabited by their students, which risks leaving students with the impression that non-straight or non-gender-conforming individuals are somehow deviant.
—Washington Post, 12 Apr. 2022
JSTOR Daily, 24 June 2024
Thus another playbook tactic is to hush them up, often by painting them as subversives or deviants.
—Marianne Cooper, Scientific American, 18 June 2024
See all Example Sentences for deviant 
Adjective
Jähner does not comment on no one seeming to have drawn the lesson that the anti-Semitic stereotype of dishonest and deviant economic behavior that Germans had long identified as a Jewish racial characteristic had turned out to be situationally, not racially, caused.
—Christopher R. Browning, The New York Review of Books, 1 Dec. 2022
The Florida bill’s opponents are worried about a world in which teachers have no meaningful way to discuss the real world inhabited by their students, which risks leaving students with the impression that non-straight or non-gender-conforming individuals are somehow deviant.
—Washington Post, 12 Apr. 2022
Noun
How Medieval Arabic Literature Viewed Lesbians As far back as the ninth century, doctors and poets wrote about women who loved women without calling them deviants.
—JSTOR Daily, 24 June 2024
Thus another playbook tactic is to hush them up, often by painting them as subversives or deviants.
—Marianne Cooper, Scientific American, 18 June 2024
See all Example Sentences for deviant
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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“Deviant.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/deviant. Accessed 11 Oct. 2024.
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