Word.ws English Dictionary

misgesture

/mɪsˈd͡ʒɛst͡ʃə(ɹ)/

misgesture verb: to make the wrong gesture.

Verb

misgesture (third-person singular simple present misgestures, present participle misgesturing, simple past and past participle misgestured)

  1. To make the wrong gesture.
    • This flesh of ours is not a good feruant, vnlesse it helpe vs in the best offices: The God of Spirits doth most respect the soule of our deuotion; yet, it is both vnmannerly and irreligious, to be misgestured in our Prayers.1621, Joseph Hall, Meditations and Vowes Divine and Morall, page 824
    • He emphasizes as evidence the fact that people sometimes misspeak with a correct gesture, but very rarely misgesture with correct speech.2008, John Clement, Creative Model Construction in Scientists and Students, page 195

Noun

misgesture (plural misgestures)

  1. A gesture that is made in error.
    • From Faisal's perspective, a more dramatic “misgesture” on the part of the Americans was needed before the oil weapon would be employed.1977, Mohammed Mughisuddin, Conflict and Cooperation in the Persian Gulf, page 52
    • He understood that if she was as bad as the instructors and professors on the committee claimed, then there were a hundred misturns, missteps and misgestures she would have made that she did not.2013, Steve Erickson, Tours of the Black Clock

Forms of misgesture

Verb
third-person singular presentmisgestures
present participlemisgesturing
past participlemisgestured
pastmisgestured
Noun
pluralmisgestures

Origin of misgesture

From mis- + gesture.

Questions about misgesture

What does misgesture mean?
Misgesture means to make the wrong gesture.
What part of speech is misgesture?
Misgesture can be a verb or a noun.
How do you pronounce misgesture?
Misgesture is pronounced /mɪsˈd͡ʒɛst͡ʃə(ɹ)/.
What is the past tense of misgesture?
The past tense of misgesture is misgestured.

Words near misgesture in the dictionary

  1. misgenerates
  2. misgenerating
  3. misgenotype
  4. misgenotyped
  5. misgenotyping
  6. misgesture
  7. misgestured
  8. misgestures
  9. misgesturing
  10. misget
  11. misgets

Source and license

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