misenunciate

English

Etymology

mis- +‎ enunciate

Verb

misenunciate (third-person singular simple present misenunciates, present participle misenunciating, simple past and past participle misenunciated)

1. To mispronounce due to poor articulation.
   • 1924, John Edward Wallace Wallin, The Education of Handicapped Children, page 124:

     The training is not primarily intended for children who merely mispronounce or misenunciate or express themselves inaptly, unidiomatically and incorrectly for reasons other than defects of speech.

   • 1935, Howard Roscoe Driggs, Living English: For Junior High Schools - Volume 1, page 151:

     What common words are usually misenunciated because of failure to open the mouth properly?

   • 1948, Harry Joseph Heltman, Handbook for Remedial Speech, page 110:

     In the method recommended here, when the sounds in nonsense combinations are larned no act of attention is required to repeat them, and when once a sequence of sounds which are used as part of a word is easily enunciated it slips into the formerly misenunciated word and makes it correct without any conscious effort on the part of the pupil.

   • 1996, G. Stewart, C. de Kock, M. Smit, Communicating for the Professions, page 97:

     It has been my experience that South Africans misenunciate more than half of these vowel sounds.