missound

English

Etymology

mis- +‎ sound

Verb

missound (third-person singular simple present missounds, present participle missounding, simple past and past participle missounded)

1. To sound or pronounce wrongly.
   • 1808, R.s. Skillern, A New System of English Grammar, page 128:

     Every word in English of more than one Syllable has a fixed accent established by the custom of the language, to misplace which is as offensive to the propriety of speech, as to missound the vowel.

   • 1871, Thomas Nash, The Old Book Collectorʼs Miscellany, page 66:

     Many of you have read these stories and could never pick out any such English; no more would you of the Ismael Persians Haly, or Mortuus Alli they worship, whose true etymology is, mortuum halec, a dead Red-Herring, and no other, though, by corruption of speech they false dialect and missound it.

   • 1939, John Baker Opdycke, Don't Say it: A Cyclopedia of English Use and Abuse, page 31:

     It is by some regarded a far more serious error to misaccent a word than to missound a vowel or diphthong or some other part.

Noun

missound (uncountable)

1. mispronunciation.
   • 1874, Eduard Adolf Ferdinand Maetzner, An English Grammar, page 335:

     They are, however, often found used in the second person without this suffix, for which the avoiding of the missound is quoted as the reason.