Meaning of bend in English

He came off the road while driving his car around a bend at high speed .
The river broadens out around the next bend.
Be careful when you're cycling because there are several sharp bends along the route.
The children are practising writing letters with lots of bends in them, like 's' and 'm'.
Why does your cat have that funny little bend in her tail?

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Geometry: bends, loops & curves

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General terms used in ball sports

Football/soccer

bend noun (ILLNESS)

the bends [ plural ]

a serious medical condition that divers (= people who swim underwater) get when they come up to the surface of the water too quickly:

On the way up, divers stop at various depths in order to prevent the bends.

Idioms

drive someone around the bend

around the bend

(Definition of bend from the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary & Thesaurus © Cambridge University Press)

bend | American Dictionary

bend

verb [ I/T ]

/bend/

past tense and past participle bent us/bent/

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to change the position of your body or a part of your body so that it is no longer straight but curved or forming an angle:

[ I always + adv/prep ] She dropped her umbrella and bent down to pick it up.

[ T ] Bend your knees and keep your back straight when lifting heavy objects.

Idioms

bend over backwards

bend the rules

bend

noun [ C ]

/bend/

a curved path or an angle:

a bend in the road

(Definition of bend from the Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary © Cambridge University Press)

Examples of bend

bend

These surfaces are distorted by hydrostatic balance toward negative anomalies of pressure produced by the bend of the low-pressure vortex cores.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

These degrees of freedom are represented by physical dimensions such as the depth of a notch or the angle of a bend.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

These authors reproduced a number of experimental observations using triangulated surfaces with elastic (stretching) and bending energy, where each capsomer is represented by several vertices.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

Higher discount rates bend supply backward more to generate multiple steady-state rational expectations equilibria.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

Since she could no longer bend her arm sufficiently, she had exchanged the violin for a mouth-organ.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

In this case the profile development was measured extensively, starting a t 2.5 diameters upstream of the bend.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

This increasing marginal benefit cushions the cost of restraining carbon use and contributes to a gentler bend in the cost curve.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

This flow slightly compresses and bends the current sheet.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

Effects of salt concentrations and bending energy on the extent of ejection of phage genomes.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

The hornblende lacks ductile bends and recrystallized margins.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

Turn the right foot to a 90 angle, inhale and as you exhale bend the right knee keeping the hips facing forwards.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

The perturbation of the exponential behaviour is most severe on the inner bend.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

This takes the form of a skew in the axial velocity profile such that the peak occurs a t the inside of the bend.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

A variety of bending motions must be generated with only a finite number of actuators.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

The bend sensors are accompanied by four to eight switch elements that are housed within a glove.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

See all examples of bend

These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.

What is the pronunciation of bend?