mislexicalize
mislexicalize verb: to lexicalize incorrectly; to assign the wrong meaning to a word or group of words.
Verb
mislexicalize (third-person singular simple present mislexicalizes, present participle mislexicalizing, simple past and past participle mislexicalized)
- To lexicalize incorrectly; to assign the wrong meaning to a word or group of words.
- The question was raised whether or not P had also mislexicalized the name of the nonsense object, and on the following visit to his home, he was asked to look for the laǒshủ from among a group of toys on the floor and bring it over to me.1977, Harold Victor Clumeck, Studies in the Acquisition of Mandarin Phonology, page 44
- Evidence such as this argues strongly against the hypothesis that children at this age mislexicalize determiner universal quantifiers as belonging to the same surface form syntactic category as adverbs (Roeper and de Villiers 1991), since adverbs in English cannot occur between a verb and a direct...1993, OTS Yearbook - Volume 7, page 86
Forms of mislexicalize
| third-person singular present | mislexicalizes |
|---|---|
| present participle | mislexicalizing |
| past participle | mislexicalized |
| past | mislexicalized |
Origin of mislexicalize
From mis- + lexicalize.
Questions about mislexicalize
- What does mislexicalize mean?
- Mislexicalize means to lexicalize incorrectly; to assign the wrong meaning to a word or group of words.
- What part of speech is mislexicalize?
- Mislexicalize is a verb.
- What is the past tense of mislexicalize?
- The past tense of mislexicalize is mislexicalized.
Words near mislexicalize in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: mislexicalize (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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