Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The act of confuting.
  • noun Something that confutes.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The act of confuting, disproving, or proving to be false or invalid; overthrow, as of arguments, opinions, reasoning, theories, or conclusions.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The act or process of confuting; refutation.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The act or process of confuting; refutation.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun evidence that refutes conclusively
  • noun the speech act of refuting conclusively

Etymologies

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Examples

  • Some hold the Koranic passage to have been revealed in confutation of the Jews, who pretended that if a man lay with his wife backwards, he would beget a cleverer child.

    The Book of The Thousand Nights And A Night 2006

  • But his confutation was the factual confutation of experience.

    The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 Thomas De Quincey 1822

  • Seiffmilts, in his great work concerning the divine order and regularity in the destiny of the human race, has a chapter entitled a confutation of this idea; I read it with great eagerness, and found therein that this idea militated against the glory and goodness of God, and must therefore be false, -- but further confutation found I none!

    Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey Joseph Cottle 1811

  • Seiffmilts, [2] in his great work concerning the divine order and regularity in the destiny of the human race, has a chapter entitled a confutation of this idea; I read it with great eagerness, and found therein that this idea militated against the glory and goodness of God, and must therefore be false, -- but further confutation found I none!

    Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1803

  • And the refutation of these has been such as alone it could be: that is to say, by signs and the evidence of causes, since no other kind of confutation was open to me, differing as I do from the others both on first principles and on rules of demonstration.

    The New Organon 2005

  • Dar Hyal, alone, with his blastic theory of art, can specially apply it to music to the confutation of all the first words and the last.

    CHAPTER XIV 2010

  • I like confutation much better, obscure though it may be in the average Canadian vernacular.

    Rebuttal: The Tamil Protesters Are Not My People « Unambiguously Ambidextrous 2009

  • Yet, in the confutation to the President's address, Governor Bobby Jindal, of Louisiana presented the traditional divisive wisdom.

    Republicans Twitter. Jindal Rebuttal; A Tweet 2009

  • As I am still in possession of that imperfect organ, I will proceed to use it to the confutation of some of his other fallacies.

    Chesterton's Response to Shaw (Part Two) 2007

  • But, this notion of Matter seems too extravagant to deserve a confutation.

    A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, by George Berkeley 2006

Comments

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  • JM thoroughly enjoys a good confutation as long as it’s someone else being confuted

    June 27, 2009