Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use amiss in a sentence

17 example sentences · adjective, adverb, noun

Amiss means wrong; faulty; out of order; improper or otherwise incorrect. Example: “He suspected something was amiss.”

Examples of amiss by meaning

adjectiveWrong; faulty; out of order; improper or otherwise incorrect.

  • He suspected something was amiss.
  • Something amiss in the arrangements had distracted the staff.
  • There is a strong feeling across the land that something is amiss in America.2009, Robert Perrucci, Carolyn Cummings Perrucci, America at Risk: The Crisis of Hope, Trust, and Caring

More sentences with amiss

  • We must find out what went amiss in order to avoid such mishaps in the future.From the entry go amiss
  • A nice cup of tea wouldn't go amiss.From the entry go amiss
  • Bad practices were rife at the factory, but the boss stage-managed the inspectors' visit so that they did not see anything amiss.From the entry stage-manage
  • "Your cerused lips and bandaged chin seem well ; Pray what's amiss?1911, Martial, Paul Nixon (translator), A Roman Wit: Epigrams of Martial Rendered Into English by Paul Nixon, page 74. From the entry cerused
  • “Is something amiss with the horse, Parr?” His gaze left the horse for a second as he glanced at Grace.2015, Becky Lower, The Cotillion Ball Saga, Simon and Schuster, →ISBN. From the entry fig
  • Have I done or said anything amiss?1997, Warren S. Brown, Nancey C. Murphy, H. Newton Malony, Whatever Happened to the Soul?:, page 115. From the entry whatever
  • Then something goes amiss and they're back home.1991 December 2, “Sidney Poitier Blames Parents for Children who Don’t Know how to Survive Tough Times”, in Robert E[dward] Johnson…. From the entry boomerang child
  • For then, though I have forgotten the reason, there is spread over everything a vague sense of wrongness, of something amiss.1961, C. S. Lewis, chapter 3, in A Grief Observed, London: Faber & Faber, published 1964, page 30. From the entry wrongness
  • But today he had noticed from the moment he had got out of bed that something was amiss with the world.1919, P. G. Wodehouse, 'A Damsel in Distress', Herbert Jenkins, 1956, p 20. From the entry grouch
  • “Yet it is not amiss for a monkbred man.1902, Arthur Conan Doyle, The Works of A. Conan Doyle: The white company, page 167. From the entry jambe
  • Every second, on each of the plant’s four floors, I heard a beep – a regular pulse, reminding everyone that nothing is amiss.December 15 2022, Samanth Subramanian, “Dismantling Sellafield: the epic task of shutting down a nuclear site”, in The Guardian. From the entry operations manager
  • Something was amiss with the world.2001, Salman Rushdie, Fury: A Novel, London: Jonathan Cape, →ISBN, page 7. From the entry sublimate
  • What she has said, and what she has done, are different things, uncongruent, so this leads me to believe something is amiss in her motivations.2000 July 29, Lilly Willow, “dear Rowan”, in alt.religion.wicca (Usenet), retrieved 08 Jun 2022. From the entry uncongruent
  • After the death of Ekwefi's second child, Okonkwo had gone to a medicine man, who was also a diviner of the Afa Oracle, to enquire what was amiss.1958 June 17, Chinua Achebe, chapter 9, in Things Fall Apart, London: Heinemann, →OCLC. From the entry medicine man

Meaning of amiss

  1. adjective Wrong; faulty; out of order; improper or otherwise incorrect.
  2. adverb Wrongly; mistakenly.
  3. adverb Astray.

Full definition of amiss

Questions about amiss in a sentence

How do you use amiss in a sentence?
Amiss is used as an adjective, adverb and noun. For example: “He suspected something was amiss.”
What is a short sentence with amiss?
“He suspected something was amiss.”
What does amiss mean?
Amiss means wrong; faulty; out of order; improper or otherwise incorrect.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: amiss (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this page: “How to use amiss in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/amiss. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.