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‪The notion of misunderstanding is approached in this article through definitions given in French dictionaries of the 19th and 20th centuries. In an action-oriented theory of language, we identify speech acts acknowledged by the speakers as misunderstandings, and discuss how speakers might have a locutionary or pragmatic gain in interpreting a speech act as a misunderstanding. The study provides examples of discursive situations in which an incident, discursive or not, is labelled as a misunderstanding by the speakers and it identifies (complexes of) speech acts supposed to resolve the misunderstanding. The analysis is illustrated with excerpts from discussions in the meetings and press releases of the European Union institutions. The concept of dissociation borrowed from rhetoric and argumentation theory is used to show that speakers try to resolve misunderstanding by specifying the starting points (or premises) of the discussion, and propose notional reinterpretations of a term. Some of these situations, although presented as misunderstandings and hence as errors of lesser importance for which one could find solutions, are in fact impossible to rectify.‪