Word.ws English Dictionary

missay

missay verb: to speak ill of (someone).

Verb

missay (third-person singular simple present missays, present participle missaying, simple past and past participle missaid)

  1. (archaic, transitive) To speak ill of (someone).
  2. (intransitive, obsolete) To say something erroneous; to speak wrongly.
    • The worde gone out she backe againe would call, / As her repenting so to have missayd [...].1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book III, Canto II”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC

Forms of missay

third-person singular presentmissays
present participlemissaying
past participlemissaid
pastmissaid

Origin of missay

From Middle English misseien, misseyen, misseggen, equivalent to mis- + say. Cognate with Middle Dutch misseggen (“to missay”).

Words formed from missay

Questions about missay

What does missay mean?
Missay means to speak ill of (someone).
What part of speech is missay?
Missay is a verb.
What is the past tense of missay?
The past tense of missay is missaid.

Words near missay in the dictionary

  1. missalettes
  2. missals
  3. missannotated
  4. Missaukee County
  5. missaw
  6. missay
  7. missayer
  8. missayers
  9. missaying
  10. missayings
  11. missays

Source and license

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