Word.ws English Dictionary

missharpen

missharpen verb: to sharpen incorrectly.

Verb

missharpen (third-person singular simple present missharpens, present participle missharpening, simple past and past participle missharpened)

  1. To sharpen incorrectly.
    • It is our opinion that this missharpening and thus consequent misuse would be the basic and primary source of the failure.1981, Charles O. Smith, Products Liability: Are You Vulnerable?, page 128
    • Curbow credibly testified that a production line supervisor brought one bad cutter to Curbow complaining about how it was sharpened; Curbow thereafter checked the toolcrib and found three others similarly missharpened.1983, United States. National Labor Relations Board, Decisions and Orders of the National Labor Relations Board, page 1404

Examples of missharpen in a sentence

  • If you have missharpened an instrument in this manner, you will notice that it does not engage calculus readily; instead , there is a tendency to slip over deposits.1991, Anna Matsuishi Pattison, Gordon L. Pattison, Periodontal Instrumentation, page 298:
  • I no longer have to worry about the possibility of the bits being missharpened or poorly swaged.2006, The Northern Logger and Timber Processor - Volume 55, page 8:

Forms of missharpen

third-person singular presentmissharpens
present participlemissharpening
past participlemissharpened
pastmissharpened

Origin of missharpen

From mis- + sharpen.

Questions about missharpen

What does missharpen mean?
Missharpen means to sharpen incorrectly.
How do you use missharpen in a sentence?
If you have missharpened an instrument in this manner, you will notice that it does not engage calculus readily; instead , there is a tendency to slip over deposits.
What part of speech is missharpen?
Missharpen is a verb.
What is the past tense of missharpen?
The past tense of missharpen is missharpened.

Words near missharpen in the dictionary

  1. misshaping
  2. misshare
  3. misshared
  4. misshares
  5. missharing
  6. missharpen
  7. missharpened
  8. missharpening
  9. missharpens
  10. misshelve
  11. misshelved

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: missharpen (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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