misattend
misattend verb: to misunderstand something; to disregard or fail to pay attention.
Verb
misattend (third-person singular simple present misattends, present participle misattending, simple past and past participle misattended)
- To misunderstand something; to disregard or fail to pay attention.
- I would have cabled you to withdraw it from the Century, but I didn't, for I was sure I could depend upon Gilder's declining it. If he hasn't done it, please take it away from him and charge him with being drunk and misattending to his duties.1969, Mark Twain, Henry Huttleston Rogers, Lewis Gaston Leary, Mark Twain's Correspondence with Henry Huttleston Rogers
- They ſhall recover the miſattended vvords of Chriſt to the ſincerity of their true ſenſe from manifold contradictions, and ſhall open them vvith the key of charity.1644, J[ohn] M[ilton], chapter XXII, in The Doctrine or Discipline of Divorce: […], 2nd edition, London: [s.n.], →OCLC, book II, page 82
- To fail to look after properly.
- Soon after this, she removed from my district; and in the year 1861, again, for the eighth time, was pregnant, when she now fell under the care of an unqualified medical man, who had been appointed by a board of guardians to misattend the poor of a large district.1869, John W. Ogle, Timothy Holmes, St. George's Hospital Reports - Volume 4, page 215
- However, I cannot leave this subject without lamenting the unfortuate attitude of certain members of the bar to misattend the execution of documents with complete disregard for their code of professional conduct.1980, Atlantic Provinces Reports, volume 66, page 79
Examples of misattend in a sentence
- I must have been misattending if he did give one, because we were all changing.1879, Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons, Parliamentary Papers, volume X, page 145:
- From the bottom-up view, the reader with attention deficits may misattend to the salient features of words.1995, Michael P. French, Ann Polzer Landretti, Attention Deficit and Reading Instruction, page 15:
- It is a case of 'epistemic drift' as defined by Kemeny (1999), in which discourses without firm disciplinary roots tend to misattend to facts and jump to misleading conclusions.2017, Stuart Lowe, Housing Policy Analysis, page 291:
Forms of misattend
| third-person singular present | misattends |
|---|---|
| present participle | misattending |
| past participle | misattended |
| past | misattended |
Origin of misattend
From mis- + attend.
Questions about misattend
- What does misattend mean?
- Misattend means to misunderstand something; to disregard or fail to pay attention.
- How do you use misattend in a sentence?
- I must have been misattending if he did give one, because we were all changing.
- What part of speech is misattend?
- Misattend is a verb.
- What is the past tense of misattend?
- The past tense of misattend is misattended.
Words near misattend in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: misattend (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: “misattend.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/misattend. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.