Mistook

How to spell mistook

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce mistook

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does mistook mean?

1. verbPast tense of mistake: identified or understood something or someone incorrectly.

Mistook in a sentence

• In the dim hallway she mistook a coat on the hook for an intruder.

• He mistook the quiet new manager for a temporary contractor.

Where does mistook come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

This is the past tense of 'mistake', a verb that English assembled from two pieces. The 'take' element comes from the Old Norse word 'taka', meaning 'to grasp or seize', which Norse settlers brought into northern England and which gradually displaced the native Old English word for taking. The prefix 'mis-' carries the sense of 'wrongly' or 'amiss', so to mistake something was originally to take it up in the wrong way. The full verb 'mistake' appears in English from the 1300s, in the borrowed form 'mistaken', and the meaning shifted from physically taking the wrong thing to mentally grasping something incorrectly. Because 'take' is a strong verb with the irregular past 'took', the compound follows suit: not 'mistaked' but 'mistook', which is the spelling trap, since the doubled vowel of '-ook' is easy to fumble.

How the word is built

• mis- (wrongly, amiss)
• took (past tense of take)