Mislexicalize

verb

verb ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Verb
  1. 1
    To lexicalize incorrectly; to assign the wrong meaning to a word or group of words.

    "The question was raised whether or not P had also mislexicalized the name of the nonsense object, and on the following visit to his home, he was asked to look for the laǒshủ from among a group of toys on the floor and bring it over to me."

Example

More examples

"The question was raised whether or not P had also mislexicalized the name of the nonsense object, and on the following visit to his home, he was asked to look for the laǒshủ from among a group of toys on the floor and bring it over to me."

Etymology

From mis- + lexicalize.

More for "mislexicalize"

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.