The root “miss” (and its twin form “mit”) comes from the Latin verb mittere, meaning “to send.” It appears in dozens of everyday English words, from “mission” to “transmission” to “permission.” But English also has a completely separate prefix “mis-” of Germanic origin that means “bad” or “wrong,” showing up in words like “mistake” and “mislead.” These two look almost identical on the page, so understanding which one you’re dealing with unlocks the meaning of the word.
The Latin Root: To Send
The Latin verb mittere originally meant “to let go” or “to send.” Its past participle was missus, which is where the English spelling “miss” comes from in word roots. Over centuries, Latin speakers built new verbs by attaching prefixes to mittere, and those compound words flowed into English either directly or through French. The core idea of sending or letting go stayed remarkably consistent across all of them.
Interestingly, some linguists trace mittere even further back to an Indo-European root meaning “to leave.” That original sense may have evolved from “to leave” into “to lose,” then into “to let go,” and finally into “to send.” You can still see that older “letting go” meaning in words like “omit” (to leave out) and “remission” (a disease’s force letting up).
Common Words From the Latin Root
Once you recognize “miss” or “mit” as meaning “to send,” word after word starts to make intuitive sense. Here are some of the most common examples:
- Mission: a sending forth, originally of people sent to do religious work in a foreign land
- Missile: something sent flying through the air (in Latin, this referred to any hurled weapon)
- Missive: a formal written letter, from the Latin expression littera missiva, meaning “letters sent”
- Admission: the act of sending someone in (ad- means “toward”)
- Permission: sending approval through, or letting something go forward (per- means “through”)
- Emission: something sent out (e- means “out”)
- Transmission: sending something across from one place to another (trans- means “across”)
- Submission: sending yourself under someone else’s authority (sub- means “under”)
- Omission: something left out or sent away (o- from ob-, meaning “away”)
- Intermission: a pause, literally a sending between acts (inter- means “between”)
- Commission: sending someone together with authority to act (com- means “together”)
- Remission: a sending back or letting up, as when a disease’s symptoms decrease (re- means “back”)
Notice that some of these words use “mit” instead of “miss.” That’s because “mit” comes from the present tense of the Latin verb (mittere), while “miss” comes from its past participle (missus). So “transmit” and “transmission” share the same root, just in different forms. The same pattern holds for “permit/permission,” “admit/admission,” “emit/emission,” and so on.
People Words: Emissary and Missionary
The root also builds words for people who are “sent.” An emissary is someone sent as a representative from one government or leader to another. A missionary is someone sent to carry on religious work in another place. Both words carry that original Latin sense of a person dispatched with a purpose.
How Suffixes Shape the Meaning
The Latin root “miss” combines with different endings to create nouns, adjectives, and descriptions of people. The suffix “-ion” turns the root into a noun describing an action: transmission is the act of sending across, admission is the act of letting in. The suffix “-ive” creates adjectives or nouns with a descriptive quality: a missive is something sent (a letter), and “permissive” describes someone who freely grants permission. The suffix “-ary” points to a person or thing connected to the action: a missionary is a person sent on a mission, and an emissary is someone sent out to represent others.
Even “promise” contains this root. It comes from the Latin pro (forward) plus miss- (sent), so a promise is literally something “sent forward” as a commitment.
The Germanic Prefix “Mis-“: A Different Word Entirely
English has a completely separate element that looks nearly identical: the prefix “mis-,” which comes from Old English and Germanic languages, not Latin. This prefix means “bad,” “wrong,” or “astray.” It traces back to a Proto-Germanic word meaning “divergent” or “in a changed manner,” possibly from an ancient root meaning “to change.”
This prefix attaches to the front of existing English verbs and nouns to flip their meaning toward error or wrongdoing:
- Mislead: to lead someone in the wrong direction
- Misunderstand: to understand something incorrectly
- Misspell: to spell a word wrong
- Misplace: to put something in the wrong spot
- Misbehave: to behave badly
- Misuse: to use something wrongly
- Misread: to read something incorrectly
The pattern is straightforward: take a word you already know, add “mis-” to the front, and the meaning shifts to “doing that thing badly or incorrectly.” This prefix was highly productive in Old English and remains so today. In the 1300s through 1500s, it even began intensifying words that already had negative meaning, as in “misdoubt.”
How to Tell Them Apart
The simplest test: if “miss” or “mit” sits at the core of the word and you can identify a Latin prefix before it (trans-, per-, ad-, sub-, e-, re-, com-, inter-, o-), you’re looking at the Latin root meaning “to send.” If “mis-” sits at the front of an otherwise recognizable English word (lead, spell, place, read, behave), you’re looking at the Germanic prefix meaning “bad” or “wrong.”
The English verb “miss” itself, meaning to fail to reach or hit something, is yet another word. It comes from Old English missan, with roots in Old High German missan, and has been in English since before the 12th century. It’s related to the Germanic “mis-” prefix through that shared sense of going astray, but it developed its own distinct identity as a standalone verb long ago.