confute

English

Etymology

From Middle French confuter, from Latin confūtāre.

Pronunciation

• (UK) IPA^(key): /kənfjuːt/

• Audio (Southern England)

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Verb

confute (third-person singular simple present confutes, present participle confuting, simple past and past participle confuted)

1. (transitive, now rare) To show (something or someone) to be false or wrong; to disprove or refute.
   • 1593, Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence:

     Procatalepsis is a forme of speech by which the Orator perceiving aforehand what might be objected against him, and hurt him, doth confute it before it be spoken […] .

   • 1644, John Milton, Areopagitica:

     bad books [...] to a discreet and judicious Reader serve in many respects to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate.

   • 1767, David Cranz, A History of Greenland:

     The conjecture of [Greenland] jointing on the east with Spitzberg, Nova-zembla, and Tartary, is pretty well, if not entirely, confuted by the new discoveries of the Dutch and Russians.

Derived terms

• confutable
• inconfutable

Translations

to disprove, refute

• Bulgarian: опровергавам (bg) (oprovergavam), оборвам (bg) (oborvam)
• Italian: confutare (it)
• Russian: опроверга́ть (ru) n (oprovergátʹ)
• Turkish: çürütmek (tr), yalanlamak (tr)