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Confute   Listen
verb
Confute  v. t.  (past & past part. confuted; pres. part. confuting)  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." "No man's error can be confuted who doth not... grant some true principle that contradicts his error." "I confute a good profession with a bad conversation."
Synonyms: 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."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Confute" Quotes from Famous Books



... plain language, at least; this was the case for the prosecution, stripped of all pedantic juggling; and Raleigh now drew himself together to confute these charges as best he might. 'Let me answer,' he said; 'it concerns my life;' and from this point onwards, as Mr. Edwards remarks, the trial becomes a long and impassioned dialogue. Coke refused to let Raleigh speak, and in this was supported by Popham, a very old ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse

... come yet. Lord Granville and his faction persist in persuading the King, that it is an affair of no consequence; and for the Duke of Newcastle, he is glad when the rebels make any progress, in order to confute Lord Granville's assertions. The best of our situation is, our strength at sea: the Channel is well guarded, and twelve men-of-war more are arrived from rowley. Vernon, that simple noisy creature, has hit upon a scheme that is of great service; ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole

... to shame me from my sneer, To lame my pencil, and confute my pen— To make me own this hind of princes peer, This rail-splitter a ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various

... whether English liberties have ever run a graver danger in modern times than at the trial of the twelve reformers. The Government sought to overwhelm them with a mass of evidence which they lacked the means to sift and confute. But no definite act was charged against them, and the whole case turned on a monstrous attempt to give a wide constructive interpretation to the law of high treason. High treason in English law has the perfectly definite meaning ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford

... them? Is there not everywhere in God's Book a flat contradiction to this, in multitudes of promises, of invitations, of examples, and the like? Alas! alas! there will then be there millions of souls to confute this plea; ready, I say, to stand up, and say, 'O! deceived world, heaven swarms with such as were, when they were in the world, to the full as bad as you!' Now, this will kill all plea or excuse, why they should ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan


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