misbehave
/mɪsbɪˈheɪv
/verb [no object]
1(Of a person, especially a child) fail to conduct oneself in an acceptable way; behave badly: Josh misbehaved, pushing his food off the table...
- We have Christmas parties and days out, and it is nice not to be embarrassed when your child misbehaves or is acting badly.
- Officers hope the incriminating footage will change the attitudes of parents unconvinced their children are misbehaving, helping to stem juvenile crime on the housing estate.
- In most cases, when the children misbehave they are abused and the real problem is never addressed with love and affection.
Synonyms
behave badly, be misbehaved, be bad, be naughty, be disobedient, get up to mischief, get up to no good, misconduct oneself, forget oneself, be guilty of misconduct;
be bad-mannered, show bad/poor manners, be rude, fool around
informal carry on, act up
1.1(Of a machine) fail to function correctly: her regularly serviced car was misbehaving...
- A bug in AIM's URL handler means that the function misbehaves when it receives very long messages.
- However, if a service starts misbehaving, it can be flagged as either WARNING, ERROR or CRITICAL.
- If the electron flux is high enough and persists for long enough, then electrical discharges occur that cause satellites to misbehave and sometimes fail.
