A word for getting it wrong
In current English a mistake is an unintended error: a false step in action, a wrong identification, a misreading of a situation. The verb is narrower than the noun. To mistake someone for someone else is to identify that person incorrectly. To mistake a motive is to interpret it the wrong way. The intransitive use, simply to err, still exists, but everyday speech leans on the noun phrase make a mistake.
The past forms follow take: mistook, mistaken. That irregularity is a clue that the second half of the word is not a later suffix. It is the ordinary verb take, wearing a prefix that marks the action as gone awry.
How English got the verb
The origin of the word mistake is not settled in every detail. Middle English already had mistaken in the fourteenth century. Some dictionaries place the verb near 1300–1330; the Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest cited evidence is slightly later, from before 1382, in the early Wycliffite Bible. The route into English is disputed as well.
Many references treat the English verb as a loan from Old Norse mistaka, “to take in error” or “to miscarry.” That is the analysis in the American Heritage Dictionary, Collins, and the English Wiktionary. The Norse verb is a transparent compound of mis- “wrongly” and taka “to take.” Modern Icelandic still has mistaka. Swedish has missta, earlier misstaga. Related nouns appear as Swedish misstag, Icelandic mistak, and Faroese mistak.
Other accounts leave more room for a home-grown formation: the native prefix mis- attached to take, which English already possessed in the Middle English period after borrowing take itself from Scandinavian. The OED classifies the verb as formed within English by derivation. Another standard etymology notes the possibility of a blend of the native combination and the Norse cognate. Either path is historically plausible. Norse and English speakers were in close contact in the Danelaw, and take is itself a Scandinavian import that gradually displaced older niman as the main verb for taking.
A French parallel may have nudged the sense even if it did not supply the form. Old French mesprendre also meant, literally, to take wrongly, and it was used for erring. That French verb probably reinforced the idea of going wrong while English speakers were still using mistake in a more physical sense.
English already had native words in the same neighborhood. Middle English misnimen, built on nimen “to take,” and misfon, from Old English misfon, covered taking or catching amiss. Those verbs lost the contest. Mistake, built on the incoming take, became the survivor.
Prefix, root, and a readable compound
The first element, mis-, is an old Germanic marker of something done badly or in error. It is the same prefix as in mislead, misread, and misuse. It goes back to a reconstructed Indo-European root associated with changing or going. The second element is take, from Old Norse taka. Behind taka lies Proto-Germanic *takan-, from a Germanic root *tak- of uncertain origin. Some reconstructions connect it with touching; Gothic tekan meant “to touch.” The deeper prehistory of take is therefore thinner than the prefix’s.
Morphologically the English word is still readable: wrongly plus take. That transparency is unusual among common nouns for error. Error itself is Latin. Fault arrived by a different French and Latin path. Blunder is later and more colorful. Mistake keeps the Germanic picture of seizing the wrong object.
The inflection stayed with take. Speakers did not regularize it to mistaked. The past participle mistaken also became an adjective: a mistaken belief is one formed on a wrong taking of the facts.
From the hand to the judgment
The earliest English uses were closer to the Norse literal meaning. To mistake could mean to take the wrong object, to choose erroneously, even to carry something off by error. That concrete use lasted into the early modern period, when a person could still mistake objects away in the sense of removing them by accident rather than misinterpreting them. It then faded.
By the late fourteenth century the verb already covered misunderstanding and taking words or actions in the wrong sense. An earlier recorded sense, from the mid-fourteenth century, was to commit an offense, which sits nearer to doing wrong than to misidentifying a face. By the 1580s the verb could mean to err in advice, opinion, or judgment. The modern core—misinterpret, misidentify—grew out of that shift from the hand to the mind.
Several older senses are now obsolete or rare. The literal “take or choose wrongly” belongs to that older layer. An intransitive “to commit an unintentional error” is also dated in many contexts, even though the idea survives in the noun.
The noun itself is younger than the verb. For a long stretch English used mistaking, attested around 1300, as the name of the act. The shorter noun mistake, an error in action, opinion, or judgment, is dated to the 1630s and then replaced the gerund as the ordinary word. That is why speakers now make a mistake rather than a mistaking. Collocations settled around make, not do or take, even though the root is take: make a mistake, by mistake, and no mistake.
The last of those phrases, no mistake meaning “without doubt,” is recorded by 1818. It preserves the older idea that a mistake is a failure of judgment, so the absence of one is certainty.
The replacement that stuck
The useful historical detail is the replacement pattern, not a slogan about human fallibility. Old English had misfon and the noun misfeng. Middle English still had misnimen. Both were native ways of saying take amiss. They lost to a form built on take, whether that form was borrowed whole from Old Norse or assembled in English after take had already arrived. The noun then lagged: mistaking for about three centuries, then mistake from the 1630s. The irregular past mistook is a living fossil of that second element. If the word had been a later Latin borrowing, it would not look like take at all.