overcorrectionn.

1830 J. J. Lister in Philos. Trans. (Royal Soc.) 120 196 The same tendency to over-correction is produced, if, without varying the aperture, the divergence of the incident rays is much augmented.

1893 Dict. National Biogr. XXXIII. 348/2 If the radiant is at a considerable distance, the rays proceeding from it have their spherical error under-corrected... If the luminous point is brought still nearer to the glass..the opposite condition, of over-correction, shows itself.

1900 J. Thorington Refraction ix. 229 The great danger in any refraction..is an overcorrection.

1975 M. Ruben Contact Lens Pract. ii. 19/1 In hypermetropia associated with convergence,..overcorrection with a contact lens can be just as effective as spectacle lenses.

1999 Canad. Med. Assoc. Jrnl. (Nexis) 4 May Treatment of overcorrection involves stopping the use of corticosteroids, applying a bandage contact lens or scraping the epithelium.

1899 Philos. Trans. (Royal Soc.) A. 192 195 My results are placed in brackets, and it is clear that..the allowances..have been satisfactory; there has certainly been no over-correction.

1909 Biometrika 6 373 I think the result is an over-correction, and the truth will lie between the crude figures and the corrected ones.

1957 F. Lockridge & R. Lockridge Practise to Deceive (1959) x. 137 That was prejudice, to be corrected. But, then, there was the danger of over-correction.

1966 A. Battersby Math. in Managem. vii. 185 Fifteen weeks after the sales increased, the rate of production at the factory had surged up to an increase of 45%; forty weeks later it had swung back in an over-correction.

2000 Denver Post 26 Nov. 5/5 The ‘must arrest’ law is an overreaction and overcorrection to the problem of real domestic violence.

1911 Classical Philol. 6 221 The effort to pronounce the significant s of these words at a time when in other words intervocalic s was becoming every day less and less familiar led to an ‘over-correction’.

1947 E. H. Sturtevant Introd. Ling. Sci. viii. 80 Sometimes..he has caught himself creating such forms as [dju·, tju·] for do and two. Such ‘over-corrections’ have been observed very often in many languages.

1961 F. G. Cassidy Jamaica Talk iii. 46 All too easily this attempt leads to what is called ‘over-correction’, for he puts sounds into places where they do not belong in Standard.

1992 Eng. Today Apr. 31/2 The choice between..who and whom..depends not just on whether one word is acrolectic but also on other distinctions in usage, including over-correction.