Word.ws English Dictionary

hypercorrect

hypercorrect adjective: nonstandard because of a mistaken idea of standard usage.

Adjective

hypercorrect (comparative more hypercorrect, superlative most hypercorrect)

  1. Nonstandard because of a mistaken idea of standard usage.

Verb

hypercorrect (third-person singular simple present hypercorrects, present participle hypercorrecting, simple past and past participle hypercorrected)

  1. (transitive) To change (a word or phrase) to a nonstandard form, or to another option among a set of accepted alternative-form options, in the mistaken belief that the form used was wrong.
    • I use reduplicate to mean "redouble," though both words should mean "quadruple," but English is funny that way, so hold off on the hypercorrecting "gotcha!"2007 October 28, William Safire, “And Now This”, in The New York Times Magazine, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 26 Nov 2022
  2. (rare, transitive) To correct excessively.
    • Likewise, both the chapcha that accompanies the modern Hebrew handshake and the explicit demand to shake hands like a "male" stem from the need to overcompensate (or hypercorrect) for the effeminacy, passivity, feebleness, and bodily unfitness so often ascribed to Jews by other Europeans...2012, Benjamin Maria Baader, Sharon Gillerman, Paul Lerner, editors, Jewish Masculinities: German Jews, Gender, and History, Bloomington, I.N.; Indianapolis, I.N.: Indiana University Press, →ISBN...
    • But their different life stages also provide the writers with much-needed fuel for conflict. It would be tempting to hypercorrect for the negative media representation of bisexuals by making Darryl infallible, but it's more helpful for the show to simply treat him as human. And that's exactly what...2016 March 7, Samantha Allen, “'Crazy Ex-Girlfriend' Is Smashing Stereotypes of Male Bisexuality, One '80s Jam at a Time”, in The Daily Beast, archived from the original on 04 Jul 2022

Forms of hypercorrect

Adjective
comparativemore hypercorrect
superlativemost hypercorrect
alternative formhyper-correct
Verb
third-person singular presenthypercorrects
present participlehypercorrecting
past participlehypercorrected
pasthypercorrected

Origin of hypercorrect

Back-formation from hypercorrection, equivalent to hyper- + correct.

Words formed from hypercorrect

Questions about hypercorrect

What does hypercorrect mean?
Hypercorrect means nonstandard because of a mistaken idea of standard usage.
What part of speech is hypercorrect?
Hypercorrect can be an adjective or a verb.

Words near hypercorrect in the dictionary

  1. hypercoracoids
  2. hypercornification
  3. hypercornifications
  4. hypercorporate
  5. hypercorporatized
  6. hypercorrect
  7. hypercorrected
  8. hypercorrecting
  9. hypercorrection
  10. hypercorrections
  11. hypercorrectism

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hypercorrect (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “hypercorrect.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hypercorrect. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.