distend

Borrowed from Latin distendō.

• (UK) IPA^(key): /dɪˈstɛnd/

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• Rhymes: -ɛnd

distend (third-person singular simple present distends, present participle distending, simple past and past participle distended)

1. (intransitive) To extend or expand, as from internal pressure; to swell
   • 1835, William Gilmore Simms, The Partisan, Harper, Chapter XIV, page 180:

     Then came the arrowy flight and form of the hurricane itself—its actual bulk—its imbodied power, pressing along through the forest in a gyratory progress, not fifty yards wide, never distending in width, yet capriciously winding from right to left and left to right.

   • 1976 September, Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift, New York, N.Y.: Avon Books, →ISBN, page 147:

     I begin to hate the theater, the feeling wickedly distended by histrionics, all the old gestures, clutchings, tears, and applications.

2. (transitive, reflexive, archaic) To extend; to stretch out; to spread out.
   • 1661, Thomas Salusbury, System of the World in Four Dialogues, translation of Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems by Galileo Galilei, Dialogue II, page 241:

     These impure and frail matters are conteined within the angust concave of the Lunar Orb, above which with uninterrupted Series the things Celestial distend themselves.

   • 1667, John Milton, “Book IX”, in Paradise Lost. […], London: […] [Samuel Simmons], and are to be sold by Peter Parker […]; [a]nd by Robert Boulter […]; [a]nd Matthias Walker, […], →OCLC; republished as Paradise Lost in Ten Books: […], London: Basil Montagu Pickering […], 1873, →OCLC:

     But say, what mean those coloured streaks in heaven / Distended as the brow of God appeased?

3. (transitive) To cause to swell.
4. (biology) To cause gravidity.

• John A. Simpson and Edmund S. C. Weiner, editors (1989), “distend”, in The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press, →ISBN.

• destin'd

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distend

1. third-person singular present indicative of distendre