Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

mistakenly

UK/mɪˈsteɪ.kən.li/US/mɪˈsteɪ.kən.li/
adverbB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #9,770 of 15,258leans written

Mistakenly means as the result of being wrong about something. Mistakenly believed, mistakenly sent, widely but mistakenly.

It is the polite correction word, since saying something is mistakenly believed is gentler than calling it false. It says the error was honest, which is what separates it from deliberately.

Definitions of mistakenly

  1. 1adverbmistakenlyAs the result of being wrong about something.B2+

    “Many people mistakenly believe that bats are blind.”

mistakenly is a manner.

Where it comes from

From mistaken + -ly.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

mistakenly in the wild

  • While later accounts mistakenly honored him as a martyr, contemporary scholarship suggests he died of natural causes.

    Pope Felix I

  • The king quail, an Old World quail, often is sold in the pet trade, and within this trade is commonly, though mistakenly, referred to as a "button quail".

    Quail

  • In competition ballroom dancing, the jive is often (mistakenly) grouped with the Latin-inspired ballroom dances, though its roots are based more on swing dancing than Latin dancing.

    Jive (dance)

  • On the double album The Drifters 24 Original Hits, the song is mistakenly credited to John Ellison.

    Some Kind of Wonderful (The Drifters song)

  • In some regions another sour mushroom-based Czech soup kyselo is mistakenly referred to as kulajda.

    Kulajda

1 / 2

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

  • take
  • intake
  • retake
  • mistake
  • mistaken
  • overtake
  • undertake
  • undertaker
  • undertaking
  • unmistakable
  • unmistakably