Misleading

How to spell misleading

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce misleading

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does misleading mean?

1. adjectiveGiving a false or inaccurate impression, whether deliberately or not.

Misleading in a sentence

• The advertisement was misleading about the actual size of the product.

• The report contained misleading figures that exaggerated the company's profits.

Where does misleading come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is built from the verb 'mislead', a thoroughly native English formation that joins the old prefix 'mis-', meaning 'wrongly' or 'badly', to the verb 'lead', which comes from the Old English 'laedan', meaning 'to cause to go' or 'to guide along a path'. The prefix 'mis-' is itself an ancient Germanic element found across English in words such as 'mistake', 'misjudge', and 'misplace', always carrying the sense of error or fault. So 'mislead' literally meant 'to guide someone the wrong way', and from the late Old English period it carried both the physical idea of leading a traveller astray and the figurative idea of leading the mind into false belief. The present participle 'misleading' became an adjective describing anything that produces a false impression, a sense well established by the 1600s. A useful spelling reminder is that the root is the plain verb 'lead', so the two letters that trip writers up, the double meaning of 'ea', simply carry straight over from that familiar base word.

How the word is built

• mis- (wrongly, badly)
• lead (to guide)
• -ing (present participle / adjective suffix)