Other forms: distracted, distracting, distracts
To distract someone is to pull their attention away from what they were doing. A phone buzzing in the middle of an exam, a dog barking while you read the instructions, a child asking a question just as you count the change.
The pattern is distract someone FROM something: don't distract the driver from the road. You can distract yourself on purpose — she cleaned the whole kitchen to distract herself from waiting for the call. The noun is distraction, and it covers both the interruption and the escape from worry. Watch the two adjectives: a distracting noise is the thing making the trouble, a distracted person is the one suffering it. There is also an older, heavier sense, where distracted means driven half mad — distracted with grief.
1verbdistractTo take someone's attention away from what they are doing.~98%
“Don't distract him while he is cutting the glass.”
synonyms: sidetrack, divert
2verbturnTo turn your own thoughts away from something painful or worrying.~2%
“She played music to distract herself from the noise upstairs.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 13 sentences found in the wild and placed 13 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Latin distrahō meant 'to pull apart' — dis- plus trahō, 'to pull'. English took its participle distractus, and the picture came through unchanged: a distracted person is being pulled two ways at once.
Latin
distractus
English, today
distract
Built from
Borrowed from Latin distractus, from distrahō (“to pull apart”), from dis- + trahō (“to pull”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA