🇬🇧 Distortion meaning: English Vocabulary Flash Card

“Distortion” is when something gets changed, twisted, or bent so much that it is no longer how it was meant to be. The new version is not quite true or accurate anymore. This can happen to sounds, pictures, or even stories. For example, if someone tells a story and keeps exaggerating parts until it’s very different from what really happened, that’s a distortion of the story.

When my little brother retold my joke, the distortion was so bad that nobody laughed, not even him.

My voice on the old tape recorder had so much distortion that I sounded like a robot with a cold.

There was a huge distortion in my sister’s explanation when she said, “I only ate one cookie,” while sitting in a mountain of crumbs.

Thanks to the microphone distortion, my “Happy Birthday” song sounded like an alien alarm siren.

In science, maps always have distortion because it’s impossible to flatten our round Earth without stretching or squishing something—kind of like trying to iron a basketball.

A child held a cracked mirror and gasped as distortion turned their mother's smile into a long frown. Each shake made a new distortion, a tiny distortion, each ripple a fresh distortion, the glass throwing face and light into strange shapes. The mother bent, smoothed the mirror, and the final distortion fell away — real smile returned, and they laughed.

This word is at the C2 level, which means it represents the highest mastery of English. It’s often used in specialized or highly formal contexts and helps you communicate with precision and subtlety, much like a native speaker.

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