Misstate

Lots of people who have heard of Betty Friedan misstate her place in history. She was not a man-hater, not a bra-burner, not a sexual confrontationist, touting the birth-control pill. A suburbanite, wife and mother, she would be forced out of the National Organization for Women, which she co-founded, for being too conservative.

Near-synonym: misreport

The speaker misstated the year of his grandfather's birth by a hundred years, but it was an honest mistake: how often does one speak of the 1800s?

Correction: August 21, 2017 An earlier version of this article misstated the location of Wuhan. It is in Hubei Province, not Hebei.