Misfactor
noun, verb ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A person or thing that causes or influences something to its detriment.
"None of these words, of course, was actually printed in direct application, but at least half of the duty of a Time writer under Hadden was to find ways and means of calling nonfactors, misfactors or malefactors such names without literally doing so, and to help vent B.H.'s impatience with human folly and fraud."
- 1 To err when determining the factors of.
"This teacher grades only on correct answer; there are no partial points for right completion but wrong answer. This frustrates me beyond belief; isn't the point of going to school to learn and be able to SHOW you know HOW to do the math even if somewhere along the line you misfactored or transposed numbers or whatever."
- 2 To incorrectly analyze the role or importance of (something that influences or determines a result).
"“The vengefulness it must take to call me with that hand!” says Coren Mitchell. “It’s only because of the cage. You would never call me with that if it wasn’t for the cage…. Oh, I misfactored the cage!”"
- 3 To refactor incorrectly.
"On the other hand, I tend to think of ugly-but-descriptive-in-a-long-winded-way names as a red flag meaning "Here be dragons!" In other words, if you've had to spell out a word's behaviour in its name, you've perhaps misfactored something."
Example
More examples"This teacher grades only on correct answer; there are no partial points for right completion but wrong answer. This frustrates me beyond belief; isn't the point of going to school to learn and be able to SHOW you know HOW to do the math even if somewhere along the line you misfactored or transposed numbers or whatever."
Etymology
From mis- + factor.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.