Misspell

How to spell misspell

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce misspell

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does misspell mean?

1. verbTo write or say the letters of a word incorrectly.

Misspell in a sentence

• Applicants who misspell their own email address never receive a reply.

• The software flags any word you misspell in the draft contract.

Where does misspell come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word joins two very old pieces of English. The prefix mis- comes straight from Old English and means 'wrongly' or 'badly', the same element found in mistake, misjudge and mislead. The verb spell has a tangled history: English took it from Old French espeller, meaning 'to read out letter by letter', but that French verb was itself borrowed from a Germanic source related to Old English spellian, 'to tell, speak or relate', which also survives in the noun gospel, literally 'good tale'. The letter-by-letter sense of spell settled into English in the late Middle Ages, and the compound misspell is recorded from around the seventeenth century. The famous trap is entirely mechanical: because the prefix ends in s and the root begins with s, the correct form keeps both, giving the double s that writers so often drop, which is the small irony of misspelling misspell.

How the word is built

• mis- (wrongly, badly)
• spell (to write or name the letters of a word)