mispunish
mispunish verb: to punish inappropriately; to give the wrong amount or type of punishment, or to punish someone for an offense they did not commit.
Verb
mispunish (third-person singular simple present mispunishes, present participle mispunishing, simple past and past participle mispunished)
- To punish inappropriately; to give the wrong amount or type of punishment, or to punish someone for an offense they did not commit.
- Multiple punitive damages are likely to mispunish defendants.1993, United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on the Judiciary. Subcommittee on Courts and Administrative Practice, The Multiparty, Multiforum Jurisdiction Act of 1991, page 236
- Some people do not correctly apply the natural law, or they tend to be biased when judging in their own cases, or they tend to mispunish, overpunish, etc.1998, N. Scott Arnold, “Affirmative Action and the Demands of Justice”, in Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller, Jr, Jeffrey Paul, editors, Problems of Market Liberalism, volume 15, page 145
Forms of mispunish
| third-person singular present | mispunishes |
|---|---|
| present participle | mispunishing |
| past participle | mispunished |
| past | mispunished |
Origin of mispunish
From mis- + punish.
Questions about mispunish
- What does mispunish mean?
- Mispunish means to punish inappropriately; to give the wrong amount or type of punishment, or to punish someone for an offense they did not commit.
- What part of speech is mispunish?
- Mispunish is a verb.
- What is the past tense of mispunish?
- The past tense of mispunish is mispunished.
Words near mispunish in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: mispunish (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: “mispunish.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/mispunish. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.