Misplaced

How to spell misplaced

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce misplaced

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does misplaced mean?

1. verbPut something in the wrong place and so lost track of it temporarily.
2. adjectiveDirected at the wrong object or based on a mistaken assumption, as of trust or emotion.

Misplaced in a sentence

• verb

  She misplaced her car keys and searched the whole house for them.

• adjective

  Her misplaced trust in the salesman cost her a great deal of money.

• verb

  The courier misplaced the parcel and delivered it two streets away.

• adjective

  His misplaced confidence about the deadline left the project unfinished.

Where does misplaced come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is built from the everyday verb 'place' joined to the prefix 'mis-', which carries the sense of 'wrongly' or 'badly'. The 'mis-' prefix is one of English's oldest, inherited from Old English and the wider Germanic family, where it meant 'amiss' or 'wrongly'; it survives in words like 'mistake' and 'misjudge'. The root 'place' itself travelled into English from Old French 'place', meaning an open space or square, which in turn came from Latin 'platea', a broad street, and ultimately from Greek 'plateia', meaning 'broad'. By the late 1500s English had combined the two to form 'misplace', literally 'to put in the wrong place', and 'misplaced' is simply its past and participle form. The spelling trap is the single 's' in 'mis-' meeting the 'p' of 'place', plus the silent reshaping of the final sound, since the '-ced' ending sounds like a plain 'st'.

How the word is built

• mis- (wrongly, badly)
• place (to put or set)
• -d (past tense/participle ending)