mislove

mislove verb: to love wrongly, insufficiently, inadequately, or imperfectly.

Verb

mislove (third-person singular simple present misloves, present participle misloving, simple past and past participle misloved)

(transitive) To love wrongly, insufficiently, inadequately, or imperfectly.
- Milkman "want(s) to get rich" on his own accord, so he misloves a woman (treats her like a whore) and gets an old car to ramble through ancestral homelands in search of gold.1979, Explorations in Ethnic Studies, page 42
- I often yelled these words like a mad man at those I thought were guilty of my guilt: “the stabbing dagger of half-baked feeling," I would shriek in their faces, and in pain — "Love indeed!"— at those beings who had misloved me so, even though they had probably tried their best.1992, Mid-American Review - Volume 13, page 20

mislove (countable and uncountable, plural misloves)

Inadequate, imperfect, or misdirected love.
- To a large extent, the mislove of the world is caused by lack of imagination. Your mother cannot recall her own youth, and so fails to project her personality into your later-generation thoughts and ambitions.1902, Lilian Bell, “Why Men Remain Bachelors”, in Harper's Bazaar, page 32
- Triple-lipped Apollo, I consign Your visitation to the night, When, amid cavernous mislove, your orbs Large with anticipate lust must diminish As, beneath my smothering embrace, The shocks your nine limbs striving to impart Shudder into the gentle heaving of sleeping.1969, Francis Scarfe, Auden and After: The Liberation of Poetry, 1930-1941, page 122
The act or object of misloving.
- " […] their friendships, their loves, their “misloves," that the world instantly set her down as a spinster, a clever woman, but a double-twisted old maid.1904, Good Housekeeping - Volume 38, page 12
- The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis RC 14567 by Max Shulman narrated by Roy Avers 2 cassettes Eleven humorous short stories about the adventures and misadventures, loves and misloves of Dobie Gillis on the University of Minneapolis campus.1981, Talking Book Topics, page 35

Goods such as bodily pleasure, or worldly fame and honor, or even human souls themselves are misloved unless loved for the sake of God .1994, Roy Wesley Battenhouse, Marian Battenhouse, Shakespeare's Christian Dimension: An Anthology of Commentary, page 46:
The way my parents and I believed and disbelieved in each other when I was little, the way we created and confused, encouraged and thwarted, loved and misloved each other, is a sad story.1995, David James Duncan, River Teeth: Stories and Writings, page 63:
I do this because as a girl I learned that sex is love from my father, the first dangerous man who sexually misloved me.2003, Rebecca Shannonhouse, Under the Influence:
We shall greet the new face of tomorrow and I shall say to this daughter of mine: "I gave birth to you, but I misloved you."2011, Maryse Conde, Crossing the Mangrove:

Verb
third-person singular present	misloves
present participle	misloving
past participle	misloved
past	misloved
Noun
plural	misloves

From mis- + love.

What does mislove mean?: Mislove means to love wrongly, insufficiently, inadequately, or imperfectly.
How do you use mislove in a sentence?: Goods such as bodily pleasure, or worldly fame and honor, or even human souls themselves are misloved unless loved for the sake of God .
What part of speech is mislove?: Mislove can be a verb or a noun.
What is the past tense of mislove?: The past tense of mislove is misloved.

Adapted from Wiktionary: mislove (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.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

Cite this entry: “mislove.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/mislove. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.