Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Misappropriate \Mis`ap*pro"pri*ate\, v. t. To appropriate wrongly; to use for a wrong purpose.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1803, from mis- (1) + appropriate (v.). Related: Misappropriated; misappropriating.
Wiktionary
vb. 1 To use something wrongly, or illegally 2 To embezzle
WordNet
v. appropriate (as property entrusted to one's care) fraudulently to one's own use; "The accountant embezzled thousands of dollars while working for the wealthy family" [syn: embezzle, defalcate, peculate, malversate]
Usage examples of "misappropriate".
Apart from the obvious injustices and brutalities involved, there loomed the more immediate issue of misappropriated authority.
The year he became Augustus, Carausius, the Menapian admiral they had appointed to defend Britannia from Saxon raiders, had been charged with misappropriating the spoils.
Over the past two decades four lawyers in this county have gone to jail for misappropriating funds with which they were entrusted.
Richard Powelson with Scripps Howard News Service on January 20, 2001, an audit by the Inspector General revealed that United States Postal Service executives cheated the public by misappropriating chauffeurs and limousines in excess of 520 times over four years, oftentimes giving rides to spouses and having packages delivered without paying postage.
The year he became Augustus, Carausius, the Menapian admiral they had appointed to defend Britannia from Saxon raiders, had been charged with misappropriating the spoils.
It was standard in well-armed research ships (and all research ships were well-armed) to fit discreet precautions against their being misappropriated, but it was also considered bad form to discuss these.
In this one, Starr had indicted Jim and Susan McDougal and Jim Guy Tucker for misappropriating funds from Madison Guaranty and from the Small Business Administration.
To conclude purely negatively from the positive absence of political odia and monetary requests that its page cannot ever have been a penproduct of a man or woman of that period or those parts is only one more unlookedfor conclusion leaped at, being tantamount to inferring from the nonpresence of inverted commas (sometimes called quotation marks) on any page that its author was always constitutionally incapable of misappropriating the spoken words of others.
Oliver Seccombe had not misappropriated any Venneford money for his own use, but he had diverted much of it into channels that he could not now explain satisfactorily.
Seccombe had no doubt abused his prerogatives and perhaps had misappropriated Venneford funds for the building of this ridiculous castle, but he was no longer of any central concern.
But it turns out that Coulter misappropriated Friedman's words in a way that has nothing to do with racial profiling or anything else addressed in his column, as anyone who reads it will discover.
The traitor steals secrets, misappropriates resources, tells me lies, holds a weapon to my throat that I cannot even see.