Miss

How to spell miss

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce miss

What does miss mean?

1. verbTo fail to hit, reach, catch, or notice something, or to feel sad about the absence of someone or something.
2. nounA failure to hit, reach, or achieve something.
3. nounA title used before the name of an unmarried woman or girl.

Miss in a sentence

• verb

  If we leave now we will not miss the early train.

• noun

  The striker's final shot was a clear miss that cost the team the match.

• noun

  The invitation was addressed to miss Thompson and her sister.

• verb

  She will miss her colleagues after she retires next month.

• noun

  After one near miss on the motorway he drove far more carefully.

• noun

  The register listed her formally as miss Patel until her marriage.

Where does miss come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English verb 'missan', which meant 'to fail to hit, to escape notice, or to go astray', and it has clear cousins across the Germanic languages, including the Old Norse 'missa' and the Dutch 'missen', all carrying the sense of something falling short or being lost. The deeper root is a Germanic base meaning 'to go wrong' or 'to change', which is also why the prefix 'mis-' in words like 'mistake' and 'misuse' signals error or wrongness. From the original idea of failing to strike a target, the meaning broadened to cover failing to catch a train, failing to notice a detail, and feeling the absence of an absent person, which became common from the late medieval period onward. The polite title 'Miss', applied to an unmarried woman, arose separately in the 1600s as a shortened form of 'mistress', and it kept the same spelling by coincidence rather than shared origin. Because the word is short and entirely regular, its double 's' is its only real feature, mirroring the Old English doubled consonant.

How the word is built

• miss (from Old English missan: to fail to hit)
• no affix