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to misestimate

to misestimate

1 6.5
Give a wrong idea of how big, how long, or how much something is
  • verb
  • /ˌmɪsˈɛstɪmeɪt/
translation icon : subestimar
  • Many people misestimate their expenses when planning a vacation.

Examples

  • Maybe he'd misestimated her in the first place.

    Fiction book (2002)
  • I assumed I had misestimated my distances.

    Fiction book (1998)
  • Are you sure you're not misestimating him?

    Blog text (12)
  • General Douglas MacArthur's Tokyo headquarters consistently misestimated North Korean and Chinese behavior.

    Academic text (1994)
  • The demonstrated existence of such discrepancies would suggest that the accumulated evidence on policy diffusion drawn from prior research may lead scholars to draw unwarranted inferences, possibly by identifying the wrong factors as influential or by misestimating the impact of significant factors.

    Academic text (2016)
  • She misestimated the time it would take to complete the project, causing delays.

  • He misestimated her level of experience during the job interview.

Synonyms

to miscalculate
vsto misestimate
23 4.5

To get an amount or time wrong

is broader covering wrong estimates or judgments as well as calculation errors
to misjudge
vsto misestimate
6 3.9

To form a wrong idea about someone or something

also applies to wrong numeric estimates and calculation mistakes
to misgauge
vsto misestimate
1 8.1

Judge or estimate something wrongly

is wider as it also covers formal numeric mistakes besides poor judgments

How Accurate

to determine
781 2.3
to calculate
210 2.8
estimate
370 2.6
to misestimate
1 6.5
to guess
1.0

Surface Forms

misestimate infinitive
misestimated past participle
misestimating present participle
misestimates third person singular

Morphology

misestimate = estimate (transparent) = mis + estimate

The productive prefix 'mis-' meaning 'wrongly' attaches to the verb 'estimate' to yield the clear meaning 'estimate incorrectly'.

Etymology

Misestimate joins mis- (like in mistake) meaning 'wrong' and estimate meaning 'to judge a size or amount'. So, misestimate is to judge or calculate something incorrectly.