Listen to the author reading this blog post.

by Kate Woodford

‘Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.’ So said Albert Einstein. It may be comforting to remember this quote when an action of yours produces unwanted results. Of course, no one likes making mistakes, but mistakes are part of life. That’s why we have so many ways of talking about them. This post and my next are dedicated to this subject.

Starting with the word ‘mistake’ itself, we make a mistake, and we do something by mistake. Adjectives such as ‘big’, ‘huge’ and ‘terrible’ are often put before ‘mistake’ in order to emphasize how bad the mistake is.

We all make mistakes.

Unfortunately, I left a zero off the figure by mistake.

I firmly believe that the government has made a terrible mistake.

A common but slightly more formal synonym for ‘mistake’ is error. Again, we make an error. There are a few interesting phrases here. We refer to human error, meaning a mistake or mistakes that are made by people rather than machines:

The report blamed human error for the accident.

Meanwhile, a rookie error/mistake (and in UK English also a schoolboy error) is a very basic and silly mistake of the type usually made by a person with little experience or knowledge of a subject:

I made the rookie mistake of taking the cake out of the oven too soon.

The whole game was littered with schoolboy errors.

The phrase margin of error has two meanings. It can refer to the amount by which a set of data might not be accurate:

The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.

It can also mean the degree to which we can make small mistakes while performing a particular task and still achieve the desired result:

There is very little margin of error for this type of surgery.

Finally for ‘error’, an error of judgment is a mistake that someone makes when assessing a situation and deciding how to act:

This was a serious error of judgment on the part of the chief executive officer.

Moving on from ‘mistake’ and ‘error’, if you go wrong, you make a mistake, and if you get something wrong, you make a mistake in the way that you answer or understand something. Someone who is in the wrong is responsible for a mistake, often having done something bad or illegal:

It’s such an easy recipe – you really can’t go wrong.

I spent ages working out the answer to number two and I still got it wrong!

There’s no doubt that the driver was in the wrong.

Finally, an informal way to admit that you are responsible for a mistake is the idiom my bad:

“Are you sure this is the right address?” “Oh, my bad. That’s the old one. Here’s the new one.”

If you’ve enjoyed this post, do look out for my next post which will include words for different types of mistakes.