misexecute

present singular third person misexecutes · participle present misexecuting · participle past misexecuted · past misexecuted

1. transitiveTo execute or carry out improperly.

   Unfortunately, it is the last man in the chain that counts. He is the one who executes, or misexecutes, policy.

   1966, American Universities Field Staff, Reports Service: Southwest Asia series, page 46

   4 more examples

   It is not going too far to say that if an agent is acting within the general scope of his work, even if he oversteps his orders or misexecutes them, the corporation which employs him to do such work is liable for a tort committed by him thereby.

   1921, John James Sullivan, American Corporations, page 208

   Thus someone may misexecute what he has decided to do after deliberation through failure to attend sufficiently closely to his actions, as when a surgeon fails to notice what sort of incision he is making.

   1982, Michael J. Woods, Aristotle's Eudemian Ethics, Books I, II, and VIII, page 153

   This inconsistency caused one learner to misexecute one and then the other of these two operations in a dismal cycle of negative transfer as illustrated in Table 6.

   1987, Ronald M. Baecker, William A. S. Buxton, Readings in Human-computer Interaction, page 290

   When the user misexecutes a correct suggestion from the help system, it is natural for the user to consider the possibility that the help system was wrong.

   1987, Michael Frese, Eberhard Ulich, Wolfgang Dzida, Psychological Issues of Human-computer Interaction in the Workplace, page 268