What does misdating mean?
Misdating means assigning the wrong date to a person, object, document, event, or text. The word is especially common in historical, archaeological, archival, and scientific contexts, where determining when something originated or was created is important. A work may be misdated because it was attributed to the wrong period, confused with a similar document, or interpreted using evidence that has since been revised. The term can also have broader metaphorical uses, but these are less common. Misdating is normally a verb: writers may say that an artifact was misdated or refer to "the misdating of the manuscript." The related forms "misdate," "misdated," and "misdates" express the same basic action in other grammatical forms. Although fairly uncommon in everyday speech, the word is useful because it identifies a specific kind of chronological error rather than merely describing a mistake in general.
verbTo date something incorrectly or assign it the wrong date.
- To assign an incorrect date to a person, object, event, or text.
"The researchers determined that the manuscript had been misdated by several centuries."
"The excavation team realized that the pottery had been misdated by about 500 years."
"Claims that the letter was misdating the painting led to a prolonged historical dispute."
A century can disappear when a document—or a fossil—is misdated.
Reviewed by Deb Chak, Editor. AI-assisted content curated by RJS Tech Solutions LLP.
Where does misdating come from?
Misdating is formed from the prefix "mis-", meaning incorrectly or wrongly, combined with "dating." The sense of "date" ultimately comes through Old French from Latin data, the feminine past participle of dare, "to give." The same Latin root underlies cognates including datum, data, and dative. The compound in its modern sense developed as a specialized term for assigning an erroneous date.
Related word forms
How misdating is actually used
This is a relatively uncommon formal or technical term, used especially of documents, artifacts, fossils, inscriptions, and other objects whose chronology is being established. It functions as a verb and normally appears as a present participle or gerund; a related abstract noun, "misdating," is also possible.