Mispick

noun, verb

noun, verb ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A defect in woven fabric in which a yarn across the warp is in the wrong place.

    "To reduce the likelihood of a mispick the engagement should be delayed as long as possible so that when the loom stops, the reed is as close as possible to the cloth fell."

  2. 2
    The accidental substitution of an incorrect item in the fulfilment of an order.

    "Cohune said he estimates that each mispick costs about $80 in lost time and shipping costs — seven times more than filling a customer's order correctly the first time."

  3. 3
    An incorrectly sampled data point.

    "Since the picking algorithm determines the wave arrival time by measuring the abscissa of an extremum, a genuine mispick can only correspond to a cycle skip."

Verb
  1. 1
    To pick incorrectly (any sense). transitive

    ""This is a song for a friend of mine, same one I mentioned before as a matter of fact. You might know him," a note jangles, seemingly mispicked, but it comes again and again, until all ears are hearing it more than the surrounding chord."

Example

More examples

"To reduce the likelihood of a mispick the engagement should be delayed as long as possible so that when the loom stops, the reed is as close as possible to the cloth fell."

Etymology

From mis- + pick.

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