Word.ws English Dictionary

miss the mark

miss the mark verb: of a projectile, to fail to hit the target.

Verb

miss the mark (third-person singular simple present misses the mark, present participle missing the mark, simple past and past participle missed the mark)

  1. (literally) Of a projectile, to fail to hit the target.
  2. (figuratively) To fail to achieve the intended result.
    • The party's manifesto missed the mark and failed to attract people's attention.
    • In a statement provided to Ad Age, Tor Myhren, Apple’s vice president of marketing, said the company “missed the mark.”2024 May 9, Emma Roth, quoting Tor Myhren, “Apple apologizes for iPad ‘Crush’ ad that ‘missed the mark’”, in The Verge

Forms of miss the mark

third-person singular presentmisses the mark
present participlemissing the mark
past participlemissed the mark
pastmissed the mark

Questions about miss the mark

What does miss the mark mean?
Miss the mark means of a projectile, to fail to hit the target.
What part of speech is miss the mark?
Miss the mark is a verb.
What is the past tense of miss the mark?
The past tense of miss the mark is missed the mark.

Words near miss the mark in the dictionary

  1. Miss Thang
  2. Miss Thangs
  3. miss the boat
  4. miss the bus
  5. miss the forest for the trees
  6. miss the mark
  7. miss the memo
  8. miss the point
  9. miss the wood for the trees
  10. miss the woods for the trees
  11. Miss Thing

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: miss the mark (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-miss the mark.ogg.

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