misattribution.

The assignment of an action, quality, or experience to the wrong person, source, or cause.

Use it for

Words that belong together

• misattribution of authorship
• source misattribution

On the page

The catalog corrected a longstanding misattribution of the painting.

Usage notes

Primary category: psychology / human behavior. Forms: Countable or uncountable by context; countable singular misattribution; plural misattributions. Legacy lexical fields mirror sense 1 only. Use numbered sense fields for all meanings. Established modern English lexical item. No separate regional spelling or grammatical inflection entry. Commonness: uncommon.