To mislead means to cause someone to believe something that isn't true, either by giving false information or by leaving out important details. When someone misleads you, they might not tell an outright lie, but they arrange the facts in a way that gives you the wrong impression.

Imagine a friend asks if you finished your homework. You answer, “I worked on it for an hour!” That sounds good, but if you leave out that you spent most of that hour doodling and only wrote one sentence, you're being misleading. The information you gave was technically true, but it created a false picture.

Advertisers sometimes use misleading claims, like showing a toy that looks huge in the commercial but turns out to be tiny in real life. A misleading graph might make a small difference look enormous by changing the scale. Someone giving misleading directions might tell you the store is “nearby” when it's actually a mile away.

The word misleading (the adjective) describes information that leads you in the wrong direction. Something can be misleading accidentally or on purpose. Either way, it sends you down the wrong path, like a trail sign pointing the wrong way in the woods.