Misquotes

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. To inaccurately attribute a quote to the wrong source or person
2. to mistakenly convey someone’s words, altering the intended meaning
3. to repeatedly misstate or incorrectly reference a statement made by another individual

Etymology: The verb "misquote" is a plain compound, built from the prefix "mis-", meaning wrongly or badly, and "quote." The prefix goes back to Old English, where it already meant something wrong or amiss, and it was productive enough in English to combine with many verbs. Because "quote" is itself older and more widely used, "misquote" reads as a transparent formation: to quote wrongly. "Quote" carries a longer history. It descends from Medieval Latin "quotare," meaning to mark numbered divisions in a text, from Latin "quotus," meaning "which in number" or "how many." That sense of counting and marking passages gave the modern idea of pointing to a specific place in a text and repeating its words. "Misquote" therefore describes a failure in that act of reproduction: the marked passage is reported with its wording or meaning altered.

Synonyms: misrepresentations, distortions, quotations, falsifications, errors

Antonyms: accurate quotes, truths, facts, verbatim, correctness