Mistaken

How to spell mistaken

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce mistaken

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does mistaken mean?

1. adjectiveWrong in one's opinion, judgement, or understanding; incorrect.

Mistaken in a sentence

• She was mistaken about the meeting time and arrived an hour early.

• The report proved to be mistaken on several key figures.

Where does mistaken come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

This word is the past participle of the verb 'mistake', which English assembled in the 1300s from the prefix 'mis-', meaning 'wrongly' or 'badly', and the verb 'take'. The 'take' element itself was borrowed into English from Old Norse 'taka', meaning 'to grasp or seize', brought over by Scandinavian settlers during the Viking age. The literal sense was therefore 'to take wrongly', that is, to grasp or understand something in the wrong way, which over time settled into the meaning of being in error. The participle 'mistaken' came to work as an adjective describing a person who is wrong or a belief that is incorrect. The spelling trap lies in remembering the single 's' of 'mis-' and the plain 'take' inside it, since the word is simply 'mis' plus 'taken' joined together.

How the word is built

• mis- (wrongly)
• take (from Old Norse taka: to grasp)
• -en (past participle suffix)