Word.ws English Dictionary

misestimate

misestimate verb: to estimate erroneously.

Verb

misestimate (third-person singular simple present misestimates, present participle misestimating, simple past and past participle misestimated)

  1. To estimate erroneously.
    • [W]e shall infallibly bestow a disproportionate attention upon those which our theory takes into account, while we mis-estimate the rest, and probably underrate their importance.1846, John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Rationcinative and Inductive, volume IV, page 560
    • However, in the absence of real data on actual language use in the aural-oral landscape, there will always exist the possibility to misestimate such impacts.2019, Li Huang, James Lambert, “Another Arrow for the Quiver: A New Methodology for Multilingual Researchers”, in Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, →DOI, page 12

Noun

misestimate (plural misestimates)

  1. An erroneous estimate.
    • This was due not to pro-German sympathies but to a plain misestimate (not confined to him) of the real relative strengths of the various political forces.1956, Carlile Aylmer Macartney, October Fifteenth: A History of Modern Hungary, 1929–1945, volume 1, page 76
    • To illustrate the nature of this problem, a misestimate of 0.01 on a favorite whose true winning probability is 0.20 is, in percentage terms, quite small compared to a misestimate of 0.01 on a long shot whose true winning probability is 0.04.2002, Nick Mordin, Winning Without Thinking: A Guide to Horse Race Betting Systems, →ISBN, page 397

Forms of misestimate

Verb
third-person singular presentmisestimates
present participlemisestimating
past participlemisestimated
pastmisestimated
Noun
pluralmisestimates

Origin of misestimate

From mis- + estimate.

Words formed from misestimate

Questions about misestimate

What does misestimate mean?
Misestimate means to estimate erroneously.
What part of speech is misestimate?
Misestimate can be a verb or a noun.
What is the past tense of misestimate?
The past tense of misestimate is misestimated.

Words near misestimate in the dictionary

  1. Misesians
  2. misesteem
  3. misesteemed
  4. misesteeming
  5. misesteems
  6. misestimate
  7. misestimated
  8. misestimates
  9. misestimating
  10. misestimation
  11. misestimations

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: misestimate (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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