misattend

English

Etymology

From mis- +‎ attend.

Verb

misattend (third-person singular simple present misattends, present participle misattending, simple past and past participle misattended)

1. (intransitive) To misunderstand something; to disregard or fail to pay attention.
   • 1969, Mark Twain, Henry Huttleston Rogers, Lewis Gaston Leary, Mark Twain's Correspondence with Henry Huttleston Rogers:

     I would have cabled you to withdraw it from the Century, but I didn't, for I was sure I could depend upon Gilder's declining it. If he hasn't done it, please take it away from him and charge him with being drunk and misattending to his duties.

   • 1644, J[ohn] M[ilton], chapter XXII, in The Doctrine or Discipline of Divorce: […], 2nd edition, London: [s.n.], →OCLC, book II, page 82:

     They ſhall recover the miſattended vvords of Chriſt to the ſincerity of their true ſenſe from manifold contradictions, and ſhall open them vvith the key of charity.

   • 1879, Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons, Parliamentary Papers, volume X, page 145:

     Then how do you account for Mr. Goffin stating that he gave a lesson on Thursday as usual ? — I did not hear the lesson. I must have been misattending if he did give one, because we were all changing.

   • 1995, Michael P. French, Ann Polzer Landretti, Attention Deficit and Reading Instruction, page 15:

     From the bottom-up view, the reader with attention deficits may misattend to the salient features of words.

   • 2017, Stuart Lowe, Housing Policy Analysis, page 291:

     It is a case of 'epistemic drift' as defined by Kemeny (1999), in which discourses without firm disciplinary roots tend to misattend to facts and jump to misleading conclusions.

2. (transitive) To fail to look after properly.
   • 1869, John W. Ogle, Timothy Holmes, St. George's Hospital Reports - Volume 4, page 215:

     Soon after this, she removed from my district; and in the year 1861, again, for the eighth time, was pregnant, when she now fell under the care of an unqualified medical man, who had been appointed by a board of guardians to misattend the poor of a large district.

   • 1980, Atlantic Provinces Reports, volume 66, page 79:

     However, I cannot leave this subject without lamenting the unfortuate attitude of certain members of the bar to misattend the execution of documents with complete disregard for their code of professional conduct.

Anagrams

• mindstate, tandemist