• Today's Word

Abberation

🔊 Listen to the word Abberation

ab-uh-RAY-shun

Definition

(noun) A departure from what is normal, expected, or typical; an unusual occurrence or deviation.

Example

The sudden snowstorm in late May was a striking aberration — meteorologists hadn’t seen anything like it in the region for over a century.

Word Origin

Aberration comes from the Latin aberrare, meaning “to wander away from,” built from ab- (“away from”) and errare (“to wander” or “to err”). It entered English in the 16th century, initially used in astronomical contexts to describe the apparent displacement of stars caused by Earth’s motion. By the 18th century it had broadened into general use, describing any significant deviation from an established norm.

Fun Fact

In optics, aberration refers to the failure of a lens to bring light into sharp, accurate focus — and it was one of the great engineering headaches of early telescope and microscope design. The Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, famously suffered from a precisely measured spherical aberration in its primary mirror — just 2.2 micrometers off, roughly 1/50th the width of a human hair — that rendered its images blurry. NASA astronauts corrected it during a 1993 spacewalk, turning one of the most embarrassing aberrations in space exploration history into one of its greatest repair triumphs.