Shooting Down “Wrong Sent” and “Wrong Send” in Daily Conversations

I admit. Receiving astray messages often sparks chuckles in me. Two rounds in a row.

The first round stems from the message itself. It feels like I’m stepping into a secret garden of ideas mantled from reality. I can vividly remember two instances where I stood as an unintentional recipient of a personal message. The first one came from a former colleague’s text message narrating her personal experience and recommendation about a certain investment plan involving cosmetic products. Apparently, it was for a female friend of hers. The other occasion was when a friend dropped me a quick story about her company doubling down its accounting process to make it to the closing of financial books by the end of the year.

What if the wrong message is a gossip or a rant against someone? Oops!

The second roll of amusement is what concerns us here. When we accidentally catch a message not intended for us, the sender frequently transmits “sorry” and follows through with “wrong sent” or “wrong send.”

Lo and behold, both “wrong sent” and “wrong send” constitute usual, never-been-thought-of ungrammatical bywords of folks both online and in person. Using our linguistic microscope, let’s zero in on this commonplace grammatical slip and dig into what this expression should be in accord with the rules of English grammar.

Both “wrong sent” and “wrong send” are utterances used as a noun phrase, denoting the mistaken delivery of a message to someone for whom that message is not intended. It’s commonly found in network and online conversations, drawn upon as an excuse for accidental missending of the message.

As a component of a noun phrase, the word “sent” and “send” serve as the noun modified by the premodifier and attributive adjective “wrong.” This is the crux of the grammatical slip. “Sent” and “send” are not nouns themselves.

“Sent” is a word functioning either as the past form (e.g., “The court sent a notice of hearing via registered mail”) or the present-perfect-main-verb form (e.g., The creditor has sent a demand for the settlement of the outstanding balance”) of “send.” “Sent” can also take the role of an adjective, as in the “Sent Items” folder of our cellphones.

As regards “send,” it likewise doesn’t come out as a noun that denotes conveyance. It stays as a present-tense verb.

Now that we’ve established that the error in both “wrong sent” and “wrong send” boils down to the form of the verb “send,” we can deduce a remedy to make these expressions straight. We need a noun!

Most verbs in English shift to noun form by pulling in an “-ing” suffix. In “Walking is her preferred exercise,” “Walking” no longer serves as a verb but a noun, which stands as the subject of the sentence. Another example is “reading” in “Bill Gates’s treasured habit is reading.” The resulting “-ing” verb used as a noun is called “gerund.”

To mend “wrong sent” and “wrong send” in the eyes of English grammar, we therefore must drop “sent” and “send,” and replace them by the gerund “sending.” Accordingly, we have “wrong sending” as the grammatical form of the utterance. That’s it!

Isn’t it fun to spot grammatical slips in our day-to-day language? Thanks to our grammatical reflex, we were able to shoot down the ungrammatical bywords “wrong sent” and ‘wrong send,” and identified “wrong sending” as the sound variant of the expression. Now convinced that grammar is a-must skill? Tune in to Grammar Lab for more!