refract
Americanverb (used with object)
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to subject to refraction.
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to determine the refractive condition of (an eye).
verb
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to cause to undergo refraction
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to measure the refractive capabilities of (the eye, a lens, etc)
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
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refractednessnoun
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nonrefractingadjective
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refractableadjective
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unrefractedadjective
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unrefractingadjective
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refractedlyadverb
Inflected Forms
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
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refractsimple
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refractssimple
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have refractedperfect
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has refractedperfect
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am refractingprogressive
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are refractingprogressive
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is refractingprogressive
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have been refractingperfect progressive
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has been refractingperfect progressive
Past
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refractedsimple
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had refractedperfect
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was refractingprogressive
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were refractingprogressive
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had been refractingperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of refract
1605–15; < Latin refrāctus, past participle of refringere to break, force back, equivalent to re- re- + frac- (variant stem of frangere to break ) + -tus past participle suffix
Explanation
Things that refract light — like lenses and prisms — bend it. If you've looked through a water droplet on a car windshield, you've seen water refract light. You're most likely to come across the verb refract when you're studying physics and the properties of light waves. We come across examples of this everyday, though — when you study a straw in a glass of water, you see the water refract light in a way that makes the straw look bent or jagged. A rainbow also happens when raindrops refract light, breaking it into its component colors. In Latin, refract means "broken up."
Vocabulary lists containing refract
Give Me a Break!: Fract and Frag
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Unwind
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Breadcrumbs
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Our legal institutions and the broader culture refract their policy values back at each other.
From Slate ● May 26, 2026
Apparently, a lot of folks feel seeing people in the real world is too taxing, and it's easier to refract your urge for connection to an app that offers only an inch-deep simulacrum.
From Salon ● Jan. 19, 2025
Wisp — alongside acts like trans artist Jane Remover or Singapore’s Yeule — refract decades-old templates through new lenses of experience.
From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 15, 2024
Unlike the shallow foveae found in human eyes, bird eyes have deep central foveae, which refract the incoming light to a large extent.
From Science Daily ● May 30, 2024
But it could not show the mechanism which causes light to reflect or refract, or the particles that cause smells.
From "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton
To work around this, I decided to use a 'star filter' - a layer of glass attached to the front of the lens that refracts light in a specific way.
From BBC ● Dec. 25, 2025
We might be told that color has something to do with light, or even be shown a prism, through which light refracts to produce a rainbow.
From Salon ● Nov. 16, 2024
“Brat” was the critical and commercial peak of Charli’s career, and the academy rewarded her up and down the program, with a second-highest seven nominations for a messy meta-rave about how fame refracts femininity.
From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 8, 2024
In the retina of an animal's eye, there is a small pit called the fovea that refracts the light entering the eye.
From Science Daily ● May 30, 2024
Of course—he had forgotten that water refracts, bends light.
From "Hatchet" by Gary Paulsen
What it also made clear is that Coachella is no longer a single cultural event but several overlapping ones divided across weekends, refracted through screens and increasingly calibrated for different audiences altogether.
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 26, 2026
Every subsequent loss is refracted through that lens.
From BBC ● Oct. 15, 2025
On the opening “Destination,” a winding and refracted character study, swooning strings trace the singer’s own sense of wonder, as she describes a fellow musician whose life serves as a mirror to her own.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 30, 2025
The reddish color comes from the light being refracted by particles in the atmosphere.
From Slate ● Apr. 5, 2024
Nobody could accept that she did not want to hear about gaseous balls and layers of atmosphere and refracted light and tiny building blocks of life.
From "Breadcrumbs" by Anne Ursu
Mr. Self has great fun refracting the details of who did what to whom and where.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 20, 2026
Democritus believed that light refracting through atoms caused the phenomenon that we perceive and describe conventionally, or by mutual agreement, as color.
From Salon ● Nov. 16, 2024
Smartphones can act as anxiety incubators, amplifying the sense of abundant possibility like a prism refracting light.
From Slate ● Aug. 3, 2024
Low-lying clouds and precipitation, they realized, were refracting echoes from the shoreline back to the radar, much as a glass lens bends the path of visible light.
From Science Magazine ● Nov. 17, 2023
It caught the light in the room, reflecting it, refracting it, but never bending light into the heart of its dark core.
From "Scythe" by Neal Shusterman
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.