misapply

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Using and misusing
adopt
adoption
avail
avail yourself of something
be/go heavy on somethingidiom
exhaust
give/allow something full playidiom
go into something
go through
gobble something up
make capital out of somethingidiom
recycle
spare
swallow
tap
turn over
turn to someone/something
turn/use something to good accountidiom
unblock
underuse

Examples of misused

misused

In English, many past and present participles of verbs can be used as adjectives. Some of these examples may show the adjective use.

As already noted, and discussed in more detail later, entirely legitimate medical research can be misused as well as used to help the sick.
She stated that there was no evidence suggesting that he had misused the money.
Those people did not care much about limitations of the arguments and often misused the theoretical results.
Reduced tolerance may result in a decrease of substance use with no decrease in the effects of the misused drug.
Because of the lack of transparency and accountability, the money credited to the pension schemes has been misused.
In many parts of the world it forms a dangerous source of infection and is frequently misused.
Consistent with the findings reported in the literature, no children systematically both misunderstood and misused a pronoun.
A human editor knows immediately whether the word is misused by judging from the context.
Technology can be used for good but it could also be misused.
For another example, needs-of-labour arguments face the criticism that agents frequently misused authority.
That is, the child sometimes misused resultative compounds as morphological causatives.
Data from the fishing task and the free-play samples showed that although inconsistent errors were observed, no child systematically misused a pronoun.
It may be that the author has simply misused the term.
In other situations, universals can be misused to promote interpretative hegemony.
Most of this work, we felt, misused historical materials to vastly overstate the ability of crafty corporate leaders to shape key features of social legislation.
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.