# mistake

Pronunciation: say "mi-STAYK" /mɪˈsteɪk/

## Noun

1. An act, decision, or belief that is wrong or made in error.
   - Simple: Something you do or think that is wrong.
   - _Hiring him turned out to be an expensive mistake._
   - _The essay was marked down for several small mistakes._

## Verb

2. To wrongly understand one person or thing to be another.
   - Simple: To think that one person or thing is really another.
   - _Visitors often mistake the copy for the original painting._
   - _She mistook his silence for agreement._
4. To misunderstand what a person means, intends, or says.
   - Simple: To understand wrongly what someone means or wants to say.
   - _Don't mistake my meaning: I was praising your work, not criticizing it._
   - _Nobody in the room could mistake her intentions after that speech._

## Verb

3. To commit an unintentional error, or to act or think wrongly. *(obsolete)*
   - Simple: To do or think something wrong without meaning to.
5. To take, select, or choose the wrong one of several by error. *(obsolete)*
   - Simple: To take or pick the wrong one by error.

## Other meanings

- (noun) In baseball, a pitch a pitcher meant to place where it would be hard to hit, but which instead crosses the plate where the batter can easily hit it.

## Origin

Middle English 'mistaken' came from Old Norse 'mistaka' ("to take in error"), which matches 'mis-' plus 'take'. The verb then gave rise to the noun, pushing out the older 'mistaking'.

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/mistake (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).