confute
Americanverb (used with object)
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to prove to be false, invalid, or defective; disprove.
to confute an argument.
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to prove (a person) to be wrong by argument or proof.
to confute one's opponent.
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Obsolete. to bring to naught; confound.
verb
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to prove (a person or thing) wrong, invalid, or mistaken; disprove
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obsolete to put an end to
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of confute
1520–30; < Latin confūtāre to abash, silence, refute, equivalent to con- con- + -fūtāre; cf. refute
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Now comes the "mediator" trying to keep peace between many power centers and "the Two-and-Seventy jarring Sects confute."
From Time Magazine Archive
Healthy, vigorous and solvent, they confute the view that old age, as William Butler Yeats put it, is nothing but a tattered coat upon a stick.
From Time Magazine Archive
As head of the Government I wish once and for all to confute this miserable lie.
From Time Magazine Archive
Sometimes they illustrate his thesis; sometimes they confute it.
From Time Magazine Archive
There they stand for ever to confute injustice, to rectify error, to defy malice; to silence, and long outlive the sneer, the lie, the jest, the reproach.
From Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad with Tales and Miscellanies Now First Collected Vol. III (of 3) by Jameson, Mrs. (Anna)
Arguably, though, Stone and Kuznick's contention is less readily confuted.
From The Guardian ● Apr. 15, 2013
Those who expressed skepticism when the American Telephone & Telegraph Co. raised the dividend rate on its common stock to $9 were confuted by the Company's earnings for 1923.
From Time Magazine Archive
As these two last-named schools have either successfully confuted or incorporated the theories of all their predecessors, a brief outline of their respective beliefs will not be out of place.
From Myths of Greece and Rome Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art by Guerber, H. A. (H?l?ne Adeline)
He confuted the most learned Jews in their arguments, and applied such wholesome truths to the test of their consciences, that being sorely galled, and unable to answer, their rage was unbounded.
From Bible Stories by Anonymous
And the individual, knowing that single-handed he hasn’t a chance against the immortal, allies himself with this and that, with sham immortalities, and partially effaced and partially confuted general things.
From Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump; Being a First Selection from the Literary Remains of George Boon, Appropriate to the Times by Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Macmillan," he wrote, "seemed in his very person to embody the national decay he supposed himself to be confuting.
From Time Magazine Archive
However, it gave him so high an opinion of my abilities in the confuting way that he seriously proposed my being his colleague in a project he had of setting up a new sect.
From Franklin's Autobiography (Eclectic English Classics) by Franklin, Benjamin
The idea is preposterous, foolish, untenable—excellent word, untenable—and as for forging, the thing is so ridiculous that it isn’t worth confuting.
From The Tale of Timber Town by Grace, Alfred A. (Alfred Augustus)
Cowden Clarke confirms Hunt in stating that Keats’s hair was brown, and he assigns the same colour, or dark hazel, to his eyes: confuting the “auburn” and “blue” of which Mrs. Procter had spoken.
From Life of John Keats by Rossetti, William Michael
In some of his works Ghazzali gives special attention to confuting these.
From Mystics and Saints of Islam by Field, Claud
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
