conflate
/kənˈfleɪt/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 2.40 in modern English
13
Scrabble Score
8
Letters
2
Syllables
8
Unique Chars
Meaning
verb
To fail to properly distinguish or keep separate (things); to mistakenly treat (them) as equivalent.
verb
To deliberately draw a false equivalence or association, typically in a tacit or implicit manner as propaganda and/or an intentional distortion or misrepresentation of the subject matter.
Example Sentences
- "Near-synonym: confuse"
- "“Bacon was Lord Chancellor of England and the first European to experiment with gunpowder.” — “No, you are conflating Francis Bacon and Roger Bacon.”"
- "But as Covid wore on, and all of this not-really-reading took on an ever more breathless quality, it became clear that we were being not confused but conflated, treated as one interchangeable Naomi."
- "But in reality, the order simply furthers the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies by continuing to conflate immigration issues with criminal ones."
- "But again, this conflates global geographic variation with race, says Alan Goodman, a biological anthropologist at Hampshire College."
- "Climate skeptics have conflated the two for years, for example, pointing to cold winter weather as proof that global warming is a hoax, most likely to play on people’s confusion about the two."
Etymology
Origin
- Source language: Latin
Word Breakdown
- Root: *bʰleh₁-, cōnflātus
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /kənˈfleɪt/
- British English: /kənˈfleɪt/