Miscompose
verb ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 To compose badly.; To produce a defective product or outcome.
"And, grieved that lives so matched should miscompose, Each mourn the double waste; and question dare To the Great Dame whence incarnation flows, Why those high-purposed children never were: What will she answer?"
- 2 To compose badly.; To arrange an artistic work in a disharmonious way.
"The Leipzig Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung said that the favourite composer of the Viennese 'has in this case positively miscomposed', but the London Harmonicon considered that the Fantasy possessed 'merit far above the common order'."
- 3 To compose badly.; To make up out of the wrong ingredients or the wrong proportions of ingredients.
"To give examples of the way our native regiments are miscomposed. In a certain cavalry regiment there are one and a half squadrons Sikhs, one-half squadron Hindustani Hindus, one-half squadron Hindustani Mahomedans, three-quarter squadron Punjabi Mussalmans, and three-quarter squadron Pathans."
- 4 To compose badly.; To typeset incorrectly.
"It was purposely miscomposed , as a protection against forged labels on bottles from other and inferior distilleries."
Example
More examples"And, grieved that lives so matched should miscompose, Each mourn the double waste; and question dare To the Great Dame whence incarnation flows, Why those high-purposed children never were: What will she answer?"
Etymology
From mis- + compose.
More for "miscompose"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.