Misled

How to spell misled

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce misled

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does misled mean?

1. verbPast tense and past participle of mislead: to have caused someone to believe something untrue or to have guided them wrongly.

Misled in a sentence

• The vague brochure misled us about the true cost of the holiday.

• Investors felt they had been misled by the optimistic forecast.

Where does misled come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense and past participle of the verb mislead, a native English formation. It joins the old prefix mis-, inherited from Old English and meaning 'wrongly' or 'badly', to the verb lead, which comes from Old English laedan, 'to guide or show the way'. The verb has existed since the early medieval period with the literal sense of guiding someone in the wrong direction, and the figurative sense of giving someone a false impression developed naturally from that. The spelling trap lives in the past form: because lead has the irregular past led (not 'leaded'), mislead becomes misled, dropping one of the vowels. Writers who reach for 'mislead' or invent 'misleaded' are simply forgetting that the present-tense lead and the past-tense led part company in spelling, just as they do in the plain verb.

How the word is built

• mis- (wrongly, badly)
• led (past tense of lead, to guide)