Definition of "veer" []

• To turn aside from a course, direction, or purpose; swerve: "a sequence of adventures that veered between tragedy and bleak farce” ( Anthony Haden-Guest). See Synonyms at swerve. (verb-intransitive)
• To shift clockwise in direction, as from north to northeast. Used of the wind. (verb-intransitive)
• Nautical To change the course of a ship by turning the stern to the wind while advancing to windward; wear ship. (verb-intransitive)
• To alter the direction of; turn: veered the car sharply to the left. (verb-transitive)
• Nautical To change the course of (a ship) by turning the stern windward. (verb-transitive)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "Sobel, rightly in my view, brings us back to the scientific truth of Galileo's observations; and whatever the reasoning and motives for Pope Urban VIII's pursuit of him, the fact remains that the ecclesiastical authorities were given all the right information and came up with the wrong answer, and while Sobel doesn't rub it in, she doesn't veer from the central point either."
• "The images, which occupy dozens of amorphous panels, veer from the sweetly sentimental — the cartoon bunnies and kittens that fill his wife Whitney Ward's bedtime thoughts — to nightmarish visions grotesque enough to evoke both 1950s EC Comics and 15th-century Hieronymous Bosch."
• "But our courts seem to have not gotten the memo -- teachers who dare to veer from the scripted curriculum are at risk of being fired, and they will not find any protection from the law."