CONFUTED

Verb

confuted

simple past tense and past participle of confute

Source: Wiktionary


CONFUTE

Con*fute, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Confuted; p. pr. & vb. n. Confuting.] [L. confutare to chek (a boiling liquid), to repress, confute; con- + a root seen in futis a water vessel), prob. akin to fundere to pour: cf. F. confuter. See Fuse to melt.]

Definition: To overwhelm by argument; to refute conclusively; to prove or show to be false or defective; to overcome; to silence.

Satan stood . . . confuted and convinced Of his weak arguing fallacious drift. Milton.

No man's error can be confuted who doth not . . . grant some true principle that contradicts his error. Chillingworth.

I confute a good profession with a bad conversation. Fuller.

Syn. -- To disprove; overthrow; sed aside; refute; oppugn. -- To Confute, Refute. Refute is literally to and decisive evidence; as, to refute a calumny, charge, etc. Confute is literally to check boiling, as when cold water is poured into hot, thus serving to allay, bring down, or neutralize completely. Hence, as applied to arguments (and the word is never applied, like refute, to charges), it denotes, to overwhelm by evidence which puts an end to the case and leaves an opponent nothing to say; to silence; as, "the atheist is confuted by the whole structure of things around him."

Source: Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary 1913 Edition



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Word of the Day

25 June 2025

DETENTION

(noun) a state of being confined (usually for a short time); “his detention was politically motivated”; “the prisoner is on hold”; “he is in the custody of police”


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Coffee Trivia

In 1884, Angelo Moriondo of Turin, Italy, demonstrated the first working example of an espresso machine.

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