Word.ws English Dictionary

hypocorrect

hypocorrect adjective: not completely correct; nonstandard.

Adjective

hypocorrect (comparative more hypocorrect, superlative most hypocorrect)

  1. Not completely correct; nonstandard.
    • They produce hypocorrect forms in an effort to speak nonstandard black English.1988, Linguistic Society of America, Meeting Handbook, page 5
    • Despite being second dialect learners, hypocorrect speakers are reinforcing linguistic divergence.1999, John Baugh, Out of the Mouths of Slaves, →ISBN

Verb

hypocorrect (third-person singular simple present hypocorrects, present participle hypocorrecting, simple past and past participle hypocorrected)

  1. To undercorrect.
    • The surgeon can hypocorrect on the operating table, knowing that in the postoperative period an additional correction will result because of:...1989, Yves-Gerard Illouz, Yves T. De Villers, Emma Dankoski, Body sculpturing by lipoplasty, →ISBN, page 417
    • Dillard (1977) and Baugh (19S7; 1992) have also shown that upper-middle class African American college students hypocorrect in their use of AAE phonology and grammar.1997, Working Papers in Linguistics - Volume 4, page 337

Examples of hypocorrect in a sentence

  • This example also shows the combination of a hypocorrect construction with a “high” stylistic figure, that is, paronomasia (or figura etymologica—mafʿūl muțlaq).2013, Jonathan Owens, The Oxford Handbook of Arabic Linguistics, →ISBN, page 180:
  • Similarly, the change bh>mh can be seen as a form of assimilation where listeners hypocorrect and misassign the nasality from a nasal segment to the labial fricative segment.2003, Ériu: Founded as the Journal of the School of Irish Learning Devoted to Irish Philology and Literature, page 128:

Forms of hypocorrect

Adjective
comparativemore hypocorrect
superlativemost hypocorrect
Verb
third-person singular presenthypocorrects
present participlehypocorrecting
past participlehypocorrected
pasthypocorrected

Origin of hypocorrect

From hypo- + correct.

Questions about hypocorrect

What does hypocorrect mean?
Hypocorrect means not completely correct; nonstandard.
How do you use hypocorrect in a sentence?
This example also shows the combination of a hypocorrect construction with a “high” stylistic figure, that is, paronomasia (or figura etymologica—mafʿūl muțlaq).
What part of speech is hypocorrect?
Hypocorrect can be an adjective or a verb.

Words near hypocorrect in the dictionary

  1. hypocorisms
  2. hypocoristic
  3. hypocoristical
  4. hypocoristically
  5. hypocoristics
  6. hypocorrect
  7. hypocorrected
  8. hypocorrecting
  9. hypocorrects
  10. hypocorticism
  11. hypocorticisms

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hypocorrect (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: “hypocorrect.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hypocorrect. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.