misread
/mɪsˈɹiːd/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 2.96 in modern English
10
Scrabble Score
7
Letters
2
Syllables
7
Unique Chars
Meaning
verb
To read wrongly; misconstrue; misinterpret; mistake the sense or significance of.
Example Sentences
- "In the circumstances the Inspecting Officer concludes that the electric train motorman, despite his assertions to the contrary, misread the up main relief inner home signal for his own and ran past the up main through inner home signal at danger; he must therefore be held responsible for the accident."
- "Now I'm in / over my head, with something I said. / Completely misread I'm better off dead."
- "Yet her obsession with remaining inscrutable has the curious effect of making her also unable to read others—for example, she misses entirely the subversive humor of the black garage mechanic, Jimmy, with whom she deals every day, uncertain whether he is "shy or dimwitted" (19). Similarly, she misreads her one black colleague, Pompey, whom she wrongly believes has sabotaged the elevator she is accused of having misinspected."
- "No South African believed it was possible—not to mention desirable—to write about the country’s white people without writing about its Black citizens; everybody’s self-understanding incorporates ideas proposed by people unlike themselves.“That doesn’t matter,” one of the editors told me, warning me I’d be “misread.”"
- "Line fluctuations can cause misreads and miswrites."
- "To bait the mark, the veteran grifter initially covers one of the three numbers on the clothespin or miscounts the marble tally which serves to award the mark fairbanked points. The grateful mark will not question the grifter's tricky misread or miscount."
Etymology
From Middle English misreden, from Old English misrǣdan (“to advise wrongly; read wrongly”), equivalent to mis- + read. Cognate with Saterland Frisian misräide (“to go wrong, fail”), Dutch misraden (“to guess wrongly”), German missraten (“to fail; go wrong; become wayward”). For the noun, compare Old English misrǣd (“misguidance; misconduct”).
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: misreden, misrǣdan