miss
/mɪs/ verb, noun, proper noun
Forms misses missing missed Mlles meess
- verb (ambitransitive, physical) To fail to hit, catch, grasp, etc. “I fired the gun, but the bullet missed the target.”
- verb (ambitransitive, physical) To avoid hitting. “The driver swerved and just managed to miss the chicken crossing the road.”
- verb (transitive) To fail to achieve or attain. “The company missed all its sales targets.”
- verb (transitive) To fail to experience, attend, partake, take advantage of, etc. “Joe missed the meeting this morning.”
- verb (transitive) To avoid or escape. “The car just missed hitting a passer-by.”
- verb (transitive) To become aware of the loss or absence of; to feel the want or need of, sometimes with regret; to feel sadness at the absence of somebody or something. “I miss you! Come home soon!”
- verb (transitive) To fail to understand. “to miss the joke”
- verb (transitive) To fail to notice; to have a shortcoming of perception; overlook. “So I'm just going over my early notes, see if I missed anything.”
- noun A failure to physically hit. “In eight shots at the target he had six misses.”
- noun A failure to obtain or accomplish something; a failure to succeed. “After four top-ten singles, the band's next release was a miss.”
- noun An act of avoidance (usually used with the verb give). “I think I’ll give the meeting a miss.”
- noun (informal) Someone or something whose loss or absence is felt. “Top striker Smith is out injured and will be a big miss for United.”
- noun (computing) The situation where an item is not found in a cache and therefore needs to be explicitly loaded.
- noun (snooker) A foul shot that fails to hit the target ball, where the player has, in the referee's judgement, not made every effort to play a legal shot; in addition to conceding points for the foul, the player can be made to play the shot again.
- noun (obsolete) Error, fault; misdeed, wrongdoing, sin.
- noun (obsolete) Hurt or harm from a mistake or accident.
- noun An unmarried woman; a girl.
- noun A kept woman; a mistress.
- noun (card games) In the game of three-card loo, an extra hand, dealt on the table, which may be substituted for the hand dealt to a player.
- noun A form of address, now used chiefly for an unmarried woman; used chiefly of girls before the mid-1700s, and thereafter used also of adult women without regard to marital status.
Synonyms
girl missy young lady young woman fille misfire lose neglect pretermit omit drop leave out overlook overleap lack escape
Antonyms
catch hit strike impinge on run into collide with attend have
Etymology
Verb from Middle English missen, from Old English missan (“to miss, escape the notice of a person”), from Proto-West Germanic *missijan, from Proto-Germanic *missijaną (“to miss, go wrong, fail”), from Proto-Indo-European *meyth₂- (“to change, exchange, trade”). Cognate with West Frisian misse (“to miss”), Dutch missen (“to miss”), German missen (“to miss”), Norwegian Bokmål and Danish miste (“to lose”), Swedish missa (“to miss”), Norwegian Nynorsk, Icelandic missa (“to lose”) and Latin mittere (“to send, let go”).
Noun from Middle English misse, mis, from Old English miss (“loss, absence”), from Proto-West Germanic *miss, from Proto-Germanic *miss- (“loss”). Cognate with Scots miss (“a loss, want, cause of grief or mourning”), Middle High German misse, mis (“lack, missing, absence”), Icelandic missir (“loss”). Related also to Scots mis (“wrongdoing, sin, guilt”), Dutch mis (“misdeed, wrongdoing, mistake”), Middle Low German misse (“sin, wrong”).
From mistress.
Webster’s 1913
- noun A title of courtesy prefixed to the name of a girl or a woman who has not been married. See Mistress, 5.
- noun A young unmarried woman or a girl; as, she is a miss of sixteen.
- verb To fail of hitting, reaching, getting, finding, seeing, hearing, etc.; as, to miss the mark one shoots at; to miss the train by being late; to miss opportunites of getting knowledge; to miss the point or meaning of something said.
- verb To omit; to fail to have or to do; to get without; to dispense with; --now seldom applied to persons.
Etymology [Contr. fr. mistress.]
Etymology [AS. missan; akin to D. & G. missen, OHG. missan, Icel. missa, Sw. mista, Dan. miste. *100. See Mis-, pref.]
Sources: Wiktionary · WordNet 3.0 · Webster’s 1913 — from the Wiktionary entry “miss”, CC BY-SA 4.0. Details