Word.ws English Dictionary

misgenerate

misgenerate verb: to generate incorrectly.

Verb

misgenerate (third-person singular simple present misgenerates, present participle misgenerating, simple past and past participle misgenerated)

  1. To generate incorrectly.
    • The evidence was misinterpreted —aside from the fact that it was misgenerated in terms of research design — and that misinterpretation was replicated in study after study after study for about 35 years.1990, United States. Congress. House. Committee on Education and Labor. Subcommittee on Select Education, Hearing on the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, page 78
    • A child who encounters English (1) and mistakenly takes it to be a V2 construction would acquire the wrong grammar and would then misgenerate V2 sentences that are ungrammatical in English (e.g., *Me saw John, with the object in SpecCP).1999, Elaine C. Klein, Gita Martohardjono, The Development of Second Language Grammars, page 364

Forms of misgenerate

third-person singular presentmisgenerates
present participlemisgenerating
past participlemisgenerated
pastmisgenerated

Origin of misgenerate

From mis- + generate.

Questions about misgenerate

What does misgenerate mean?
Misgenerate means to generate incorrectly.
What part of speech is misgenerate?
Misgenerate is a verb.
What is the past tense of misgenerate?
The past tense of misgenerate is misgenerated.

Words near misgenerate in the dictionary

  1. misgeneralizations
  2. misgeneralize
  3. misgeneralized
  4. misgeneralizes
  5. misgeneralizing
  6. misgenerate
  7. misgenerated
  8. misgenerates
  9. misgenerating
  10. misgenotype
  11. misgenotyped

Source and license

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