deviationnoun/ˌdiː.viˈeɪʃən/

• 1

  The act of deviating; wandering off the correct or true path or road.

• 2

  A departure from the correct way of acting.

  • The combination of Archie Jones’s working-class, Cockney accent, Samad’s Asian-English and Clara’s Creolized Caribbean English represent socio-linguistic deviations from Standard English as the centripetal forces of language undermining any notion of a homoglossic centre to the nation’s language and culture.
• 3

  The state or result of having deviated; a transgression; an act of sin; an error; an offense.

  • mankind’s deviation from divine will
  • The principle of unity of control in industry was soon introduced, and dreams of the collective administration of factories were condemned as a syndicalist deviation.
• 4

  A detour in a road or railway.

  • "A rough place, my last district; sixty navvies on the Springbank deviation works, let alone eighty of these dole bugs to attend to."
• 5

  aeronauticsaerospaceaviationA detour to one side of the originally-planned flightpath (for instance, to avoid weather); the act of making such a detour.

  • The flightcrew observed en route thunderstorms both visually and on the airplane's weather radar, so they requested and received clearance for a deviation to the left of course from the HNL Combined Center Radar Approach Control (CERAP).
• 6

  The voluntary and unnecessary departure of a ship from, or delay in, the regular and usual course of the specific voyage insured, thus releasing the underwriters from their responsibility.

• 7

  The shortest distance between the center of the target and the point where a projectile hits or bursts.

• 8

  mathematicssciencesstatisticsFor interval variables and ratio variables, a measure of difference between the observed value and the mean.