misread

present singular third person misreads · participle present misreading

1. To read wrongly; misconstrue; misinterpret; mistake the sense or significance of.

   Now I'm in / over my head, with something I said. / Completely misread I'm better off dead.

   2002, “Over My Head (Better Off Dead)”, in Does This Look Infected? (CD), performed by Sum 41, Island Records, via YouTube, →OCLC

   3 more examples

   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.

   1961 March, “Talking of trains: Collision at Waterloo”, in Trains Illustrated, page 138

   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.

   2020, Stephanie Brown, Éva Tettenborn, Engaging Tradition, Making It New, page 146

   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.”

   2022 October 24, Eve Fairbanks, “Why Wasn’t I Canceled?”, in The Atlantic

plural misreads

1. An instance of reading wrongly.

   Line fluctuations can cause misreads and miswrites.

   1983, Lawrence Calmus, The business guide to small computers, page 143

   1 more example

   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.

   2011, Richard Margittay, Carnival Games: $10,000,000,000 Hoodwink Racket