Borrowed from Latin distendō.

• (British) IPA: /dɪˈstɛnd/

distend (distends, present participle distending; simple past and past participle distended)

1. (intransitive) To extend or expand, as from internal pressure; to swell
   • 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.
   • 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], 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.

• French: distendre