Edit Distance in l1: Matching Bounds up to Constants in the Exponent

We determine the exponential scale of the least ℓ${}_1$ distortion of unit-cost edit distance on all strings of length at most d. For every sufficiently large d, uniformly over finite alphabets of size at least two, the distortion lies between $\exp (c\sqrt{\log d\log \log d})$ and $\exp (C\sqrt{\log d\log \log d})$ for absolute constants $c,C>0$. The lower bound already holds on binary strings of one common length. Thus the order of logarithmic distortion is sharp up to absolute constants.