The AI-powered English dictionary
third-person singular simple present confutes, present participle confuting, simple past and past participle confuted
(transitive, now rare) To show (something or someone) to be false or wrong; to disprove or refute. quotations
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 […] .
1593, Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence
bad books [...] to a discreet and judicious Reader serve in many respects to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate.
1644, John Milton, Areopagitica
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.
1767, David Cranz, A History of Greenland