Missound

"Missound" in a Sentence (4 examples)

Every word in English of more than one Syllable has a fixed accent established by the custom of the language, to misplace which is as offensive to the propriety of speech, as to missound the vowel.

Many of you have read these stories and could never pick out any such English; no more would you of the Ismael Persians Haly, or Mortuus Alli they worship, whose true etymology is, mortuum halec, a dead Red-Herring, and no other, though, by corruption of speech they false dialect and missound it.

It is by some regarded a far more serious error to misaccent a word than to missound a vowel or diphthong or some other part.

They are, however, often found used in the second person without this suffix, for which the avoiding of the missound is quoted as the reason.

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