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misunderstand

verbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//mɪs.ʌn.də(ɹ)ˈstænd//
  • United Kingdom//mɪs.ʌn.dɚˈstænd//

To understand incorrectly, while believing one has understood correctly.

verb

  1. 1

    To understand incorrectly, while believing one has understood correctly.

    We found that teen drivers and the public largely misunderstand the legal status of cannabis use and do not fully recognize the risks of cannabis-impaired driving.

Etymology

From Middle English mys-understanden, equivalent to mis- + understand.

Forms

past tense
misunderstood
past participle
misunderstood
present participle
misunderstanding
third person singular
misunderstands
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).