distend

• (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, Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift, New York: Avon, →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.
   • 1662 Thomas Salusbury, Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (Dialogue 2):

     I begin to hate the theater, the feeling wickedly distended by histrionics, all my old gestures, clutchings, tears, and applications. 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], […], OCLC 228722708; republished as Paradise Lost in Ten Books: […], London: Basil Montagu Pickering […], 1873, OCLC 230729554:

     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.

• distensible

• “distend”, in The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989, →ISBN.

• destin'd

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distend

1. third-person singular present indicative of distendre