Other forms: mistakes, mistaken, mistook, mistaking
A mistake is something you got wrong without meaning to — a wrong turning, a wrong answer, a name spelled wrong on a form. The whole idea of the word is that nobody intended it, which is what separates a mistake from a lie.
You make a mistake; you never do one, and that collocation catches out speakers of almost every other language. By mistake means accidentally, and it is the ordinary way to say it: I took your coat by mistake. Two near-words sit close. An error is the same thing in a more formal or technical register — a spelling error, a rounding error. A fault is a defect in a thing, or blame attached to a person. And the verb has a second use worth knowing: mistake A for B is to confuse one with the other.
1nounmistakeSomething done wrong without meaning to.~88%
“It was an honest mistake and she apologised at once.”
2verbwrongTo be wrong about something.~6%
“If I do not mistake, this is the third time this week.”
3verbconfuseTo confuse one person or thing with another.~6%
“People often mistake her for her sister.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 16 sentences found in the wild and placed 16 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
mistake is an error.
Also accepted in games: error
The verb came from Old Norse mistaka, to take wrongly — mis- plus taka, to take. That is a good picture of the thing: a mistake is a wrong thing picked up in place of the right one, and the noun did not exist until the verb had been in English for two hundred years.
Old Norse
mistaka — to take in error, to miscarry
Middle English
mistaken
English, today
mistake
From Middle English mistaken, from Old Norse mistaka (“to take in error, to miscarry”); equivalent to mis + take. Cognate with Icelandic mistaka (“to mistake”), Swedish missta (“to mistake”) (before apocope misstaga). The noun, which replaced earlier mistaking, is derived from the verb. Compare Swedish misstag (“mistake”), Faroese mistak (“mitake”), Icelandic mistak (“mistake”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA