12 English Words Almost Everyone Uses Incorrectly

There’s no referee in the English language. No one is policing it and approving definitions. That means that a word can become what the majority of people decide to make of it, which is how the true meaning of a word can be lost to time and popular usage. This is so common that sometimes even dictionaries give up on correcting people and just end up putting the wrong definition on the book.

What was once considered wrong becomes widespread, so much so that correcting someone makes you the problem at the dinner table. But that doesn’t make the original meaning any less real or interesting. These are 12 common English words you’re probably using wrong.

In modern English, "decimate" refers to destruction. A hurricane decimates the coastline or a poor performance decimates a company's stock value. In both cases, the meaning is almost identical. Something is being annihilated or is close to being annihilated.

For the Romans, however, the word had a completely different and much scarier meaning. To "decimate" was to punish soldiers. The etymology of "decimate" literally means "to reduce by one-tenth." A rebellious or cowardly formation was split up into tens, and a lottery was drawn. One soldier in ten was beaten to death by the other nine.

The figurative usage of the word began in the 17th century, making it one of the oldest examples on this list, but the numerical root is still buried in there if you look carefully enough.

Rain on your wedding day is not ironic. It’s just bad weather. A traffic jam on your way to a place you are already running late is not ironic either, regardless of what some popular 1995 song says about that particular situation. Irony became a generic label for any coincidental misfortune, and it happens all too often.

Irony is based on a specific form of opposition, on an occurrence that contradicts the expectations of a given situation. A fire station burning down because its own alarm failed is ironic. A marriage therapist filing for divorce is ironic.

The Greek root of the word, eironeia, means feigned ignorance or dissimulation, the gap between what is said and what is meant. That discrepancy between appearance and reality is what irony thrives on. Coincidence alone, however inconvenient, does not constitute irony.

This one is truly dangerous, which is why it has been quietly removed from most warning labels. The "in-" prefix reads like a negation, which is how it works in words like “invisible” and “inconclusive.” That’s why people thought inflammable meant "does not catch fire." In reality, "inflammable" means the opposite.

The "in-" prefix in this case is borrowed from the Latin word inflammare, which means "to ignite". Inflammable and flammable have the same meaning. Those in charge of safety finally realized that having the word for a highly combustible substance sounding like it doesn’t burn was asking for legal trouble. Therefore, "flammable" was introduced onto labels specifically to remove the ambiguity. The word for things that cannot burn is "nonflammable", and you want to be very sure you got it right.

Saying "I am nauseous" is typically meant to communicate the feeling of being queasy. But if you say that same phrase to a careful writer, you may get a small, pained look as you’ve just announced that you make others sick.

The strict split is simple enough. Nauseated refers to the feeling of illness, whereas nauseous refers to the quality of being nauseating. Therefore, a nauseous odor makes you nauseated. The word itself comes from the Latin word “nausea”, which in turn comes from the Greek “nausia.” Both meant literally "ship-sickness," with naus meaning "ship."
Trying to get people to say this one right is a losing battle, honestly, and modern dictionaries define both uses of the word, but the difference is still there for those who care about it

A fatal car crash is a tragedy. A house fire that kills a family is a tragedy. None of these is a travesty, though the word gets swapped in constantly as if it were a more dramatic synonym for something terrible. In reality, a travesty is a grotesque or absurd imitation, a mockery of the real thing.

The term derives from the Italian word "travestire," which means "to disguise." Originally, the word described serious literary works rewritten in a ridiculous style to mock the original. A trial where the truth is manipulated is also considered a travesty of justice since it wears the costume of justice while delivering the opposite. Confusing "tragedy" with "travesty" is so common that one may even hear it from politicians or read it in news articles, but a travesty is more like a parody than a catastrophe.

To call a judge disinterested is to pay him or her a compliment. When you describe your teenager as being disinterested in the family vacation, you are using the wrong word. This mistake is so common that nearly everyone makes it.
By disinterested, we mean impartial, without personal interest or bias. It’s the kind of attribute that we look for in an arbiter or a referee. Uninterested means unenthusiastic or indifferent.

Back in the 1600s, "disinterested" meant unconcerned in the same way "uninterested" does today. It was only by the late eighteenth century that the two terms started assuming the meanings that are currently assigned to them. That history is part of why the confusion feels so natural, and why plenty of people insist there is no error here at all. Careful usage still holds the line, mostly because "disinterested" fills a job no other single word does quite as cleanly.

“Plethora” is often used as an elevated way of saying "lots," usually in a positive sense. A plethora of choices, a plethora of skills. Used this way, it just means a generous abundance, something to be pleased about.

That’s not quite what it was built to carry. The word “plethora” was coined in the 16th century as a medical term for an unhealthy excess of bodily fluids, particularly the overabundance of blood in the body. It was taken from the Greek word "plethore," which means "fullness." The point was never a neutral quantity. It was meant as an unhealthy abundance, an overfullness that tips into a problem. A plethora of choices implies not merely a happy abundance, but rather something overwhelming in volume and difficult to take advantage of. Over time, this figurative usage softened, so while the usage above may not be entirely incorrect, the word still carries a faint whiff of "too much for your own good."

The word “peruse” is almost exclusively used to denote skimming or casually examining something. You peruse a menu or the headlines. The word has picked up a casual, breezy feel, probably because it sounds a little like "browse." The historical definition is the opposite. Peruse means to examine something carefully. This meaning has diverged enough to be included in dictionaries along with its contradictory sense. Tell someone to peruse a contract, and half of them will study every clause while the other half will skim through it.

"Very unique" or "the most unique house on the street." Phrases like these pop up all the time, and every one of them makes the same subtle mistake, because unique cannot be relative.

Unique means one of a kind, the only one of its type. A word derived from the Latin unicus, "one" or "single," it describes an absolute state, not a spectrum. Something is either unique or it isn’t. When someone says "very unique," what he or she means is usually something like "unusual" or "rare," and that's a relative property. The watered-down sense of "uncommon" has been around since the mid-19th century, but the strict sense is precisely why the word has any meaning left in it at all. Qualify it, and that meaning is gone.

"Chronic" is used to show that a problem is serious. A chronic case of pain or a chronically bad situation. "Chronic" is used to express intensity, something acute and terrible.

In reality, "chronic" doesn’t mean severity. It describes a quality of time rather than one of intensity. A chronic problem lasts a long time or occurs repeatedly, unlike "acute," which refers to something short and sharp. In fact, “chronic" is closer to "persistent" rather than "serious." A chronic problem can be a relatively mild one that just won’t go away, while an acute problem may be intense but brief. "Chronic" and "acute" form a matched pair in medicine, chronic for the slow burn and acute for the flare-up, and the substitution of "chronic" for "bad" destroys their intended contrast.

When we talk about an alibi, we are usually talking about a sort of excuse. “He had an alibi for not attending the meeting,” or “she fabricated an alibi for her delay.” The use of the term alibi has been generalized into a kind of slightly shifty justification that no one really believes.

The true definition of the word is quite precise. It’s also elegant. Alibi is a Latin term meaning "elsewhere." In its true form, the term alibi is a defense that establishes the accused was demonstrably elsewhere at the time of the event. This is the very purpose of the term. An alibi says you were somewhere else and therefore could not have done something you are being accused of. That’s more than a mere excuse. A suspect's alibi placed him in another city during the robbery. Strip out the "elsewhere," and you lose what separates an alibi from an ordinary excuse.

Describe a point as being "moot" in the modern day, and what you are saying is that it’s irrelevant and not worth debating. You’re saying the debate is already over. That’s the current meaning of the term, and one that is particularly prevalent in the U.S.

However, when the term was first used, it carried a completely different meaning. "Moot" came from an Old English word used for a gathering where matters were argued out, and in the 16th century, a "moot" became a hypothetical case staged by law students for practice and debate. A moot point, then, was an open question, something worth arguing precisely because it was undecided. Law students have continued this practice to this day in "moot court." The flip to "irrelevant" came later, on the logic that a purely hypothetical question has no practical stakes, and the two senses now sit side by side awkwardly. That’s why a "moot point" can mean either "let's debate it" or "why bother."