Misreads

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. Reads or understands text or information incorrectly without grasping its true meaning
2. Interprets written or spoken content wrongly, leading to a mistaken understanding
3. Mistakes the meaning or sense of words or messages when reading or perceiving information

Etymology: "Misreads" is the third-person singular present of "misread", so it simply names what someone does when they take a text, a sign or a situation the wrong way. The verb goes back to Old English "misrǣdan", which meant "to advise wrongly" as well as "to read wrongly", so the earliest sense was closer to giving bad counsel than to a slip of the eye. The prefix "mis-" comes from Old English and attaches a sense of error or wrongness to the base verb "read", which in Old English meant to interpret or explain, not only to decode letters. Because the root verb was about making sense of things, the compound carried that broader sense of interpreting badly into later English. Old English relatives survive in other Germanic languages. Dutch "misraden" means "to guess wrongly", and German "missraten" means "to fail" or "go wrong", so the same idea of a misjudged course runs through several modern tongues.

Synonyms: misinterprets, misunderstands, misconstrues, distorts, misjudges

Antonyms: understands, comprehends, interprets, reads accurately, perceives