perversion

UK/pəˈvɜː.ʒən/US/pəɹˈvɜɹ.ʒən/

nounC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #9,190 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: perversions

A perversion is a turning of something good to a corrupt use. A perversion of justice, a perversion of the truth, perversion of the law.

The legal sense is precise, since a perversion of the course of justice covers anything from destroying evidence to intimidating a witness and is a serious offence. The sexual sense is dated and is now largely avoided.

Definitions of perversion

1nounperversionA turning of something good to a corrupt use.C1
“Spending the charity's money on the director's holidays was a perversion of its purpose.”

perversion is a corruption.

Where it comes from

Middle English
perversion
English, today
perversion

From Middle English perversion.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

perversion in the wild

In western culture, it has come to be used to refer to softcore or playful sexuality, as distinct from the word hentai, which connotes perversion or fetishism.
Ecchi
Perversion usually differs from "deviant behavior", in that the latter covers areas of behavior (such as petty crime) for which perversion would be too strong a term.
Perversion
The Atlanta Public Library perversion case was a series of arrests made in September 1953 at the Atlanta Central Library in Atlanta, Georgia, United States.
Atlanta Public Library perversion case

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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