Definition

Confusing or perplexing, causing one to become bewildered.

Pronunciation

US English

UK English


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Excerpts from News Articles

The case initially bewildered the local authorities in the small college town for weeks. On Dec. 30, seven weeks after the tragic incident, officials arrested 28-year-old Bryan Christopher Kohberger, who is now facing murder charges. As more details are revealed about Kohberger, who has yet to enter a plea, the university is planning a memorial garden for the four slain students.

Logo 2023-02-25 NPR

So, when we perceive perplexity in the facial expression of the victim of clumsiness (a look of bewilderment , surprise or astonishment), this information creates a context that triggers our laughter. On the other hand, if we can read suffering or anger in the facial expression, we will be touched by the distress of the victim of the fall and be empathetic to their distress, which will prevent us from laughing. Our neural circuits appear to have the ability to recognize and appreciate the funny elements of unfortunate situations and analyze the context as non-threatening.

Logo 2023-03-13 The Conversation

"It was a really sweet and important moment I was grateful to give my kid," they explain. "And the idea that somebody's bigotry could restrict my freedom to take my kid to an event like that, to expose them to an artistic expression, is just bewildering ."

Logo 2023-03-21 NPR

Choosing where to lay your head in London while travelling in the UK can be a tricky affair. With a plethora of snazzy design hotels, some of the grandest, oldest establishments around and a frankly bewildering array of so-so spots offering cheap-as-chips theatre dinners to baffled tourists, it can be tempting to book into the nearest Premier Inn and be done with it.

Logo 2023-03-29 The Independent

In that sense, what restorative justice entails is not two versions of the past, but two versions of the future. In one, Britain is bewildered by its changing nature, riven by its inequalities, racial and economic, and childishly blowing raspberries every time someone mentions slavery, colonialism, or empire. In the other, Britain is beginning to understand that it’s time to grow up. I know which one I’d rather be a part of.

Logo 2023-03-30 The Guardian

Zapruder’s candor about the fear, bewilderment and frustration he felt at hearing his son’s diagnosis, and the scramble to coordinate interventions and supports, will resonate with parents who have received similar news. “There is a singular terror when the story is suddenly taken away, and one is left in a new life,” he writes.

Logo 2023-04-02 The Washington Post

But when appraising Picasso, you can’t just single out masterpieces and ignore the cumulative effect of his inventiveness — the sense in which he was continuously involved in a series of, as he put it, “researches.” His bewildering productivity can tempt us to categorize much of his output as casual, lightweight or somehow unserious. But — as artists like Paul Klee, Miró and Matisse also showed — things can be playful and profound at the same time. Picasso did more than anyone to entrench that liberating modern insight.

Logo 2023-04-03 The Washington Post

"The use of the formulation 'unlawful deportation of population (children)' in the ICC's official statement causes bewilderment ," it said, adding it had not received any documents from the ICC, whose jurisdiction Russia does not recognise.

Logo 2023-04-04 Reuters

“Put simply, there’s only one recording of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue,’ but thousands of ‘Rhapsody in Blue.’ This first kind of search, in someone newly interested in classical music, can be so off-putting and bewildering , so I’m very excited for everyone to finally have a way into this remarkable universe of music, which is welcoming to new (and old) classical fans, and which rewards enthusiasm for music with music, directly and intuitively,” Greenwood added.

Logo 2023-04-07 EURO News

Despite neither Chalamet, 27, nor Jenner, 25, confirming or denying the reported relationship, fans have been bewildered by the mere suggestion they are dating.

Logo 2023-04-07 The Independent

I have been systematically tortured, physically and psychologically, and there is currently evidence of heavy metal poisoning in my body. I now suffer from a bewildering array of over 20 serious illnesses, all of which developed in confinement.

Logo 2023-04-07 Politico

It is true that this stubborn belief has seen me through the most difficult moments of my writing career: financial worries, years of nothing but rejections, entire drafts that I had to abandon, weeks of isolation when I didn’t talk to another human being aside from my husband. And in those bewildering days of early parenthood, I found myself reaching for that belief over and over. As new parents, we search so often for some external validation, some authoritative guide that will save us from the terror of feeling our way through.

Logo 2023-04-10 Literary Hub

They are not being exploited or manipulated, exactly, though that’s the obvious argument. “These women want to cry,” a bewildered audience member said after the talk.

Logo 2023-04-10 Literary Hub

“Coming out of the fog” means different things to different adoptees. It can mean realizing that the obscure, intermittent unhappiness or bewilderment you have felt since childhood is not a personality trait but something shared by others who are adopted. It can mean realizing that you were a good, hardworking child partly out of a need to prove that your parents were right to choose you, or a sense that it was your job to make your parents happy, or a fear that if you weren’t good your parents would give you away, like the first ones did.

Logo 2023-04-10 The New Yorker

The collision of internet youth culture and national security may have seemed bewildering , but it has happened with increasing frequency in recent years. And the surfacing of classified documents on Discord was a reminder of how the digital world has increasingly affected real life in sometimes dangerous ways.

Logo 2023-04-11 The New York Times

However, this is not an academic book. There is no assumption of technical musical knowledge, and lives are carefully placed in wider political and social contexts. Broad perhaps tells us more about these women’s relationships than their music, from Smyth’s long procession of female lovers, through Clarke’s prolonged affair with a married man and Howell’s resolute singledom, to Carwithen’s bewildering devotion to Alwyn.

Logo 2023-04-11 The Conversation

That same month, Emily Tibbs’s 2-year-old son suddenly developed a rash on his face, a cough and stomach pain that made him cry after eating Dave’s Killer white bread, Tibbs said. The Nashville mom was bewildered : Her toddler was allergic to sesame, but she hadn’t fed him anything other than the foods he normally ate.

Logo 2023-04-11 The Washington Post

A 1964 article in Newsweek pointed out that green grass paint was being sold in 35 states. The magazine opined that because a homeowner “needs a Bachelor of Chemistry to comprehend the bewildering variety of weed and bug destroyers now fogging the market,” paint was becoming an attractive alternative.

Logo 2023-04-11 The Conversation

A fiercely pounding score by Vincenzo Lamagna and an impressively austere design concept by Tim Yip contribute to a richly sinister atmosphere, which Khan furnishes with some menacing, if predictable, fascistic parades for the proles and drones. If only there wasn’t so much empty repetition and a bewildering succession of pointless exits and entrances. Erina Takahashi is wasted as Marie; the commandant (Fabian Reimair) is too melodramatically nasty to be plausible.

Logo 2023-04-12 The Spectator

I’ve struggled to locate the coconut milk ever since it first went on manoeuvres just before the pandemic. How much fun they must have watching us on CCTV, bewitched, bothered and bewildered , scurrying hopelessly up and down aisle after aisle. I forgive them.

Logo 2023-04-13 The Guardian

As utopian oases dry up, a desert of banality, and bewilderment spreads …

Logo 2023-04-13 The Conversation

Even with those flaws, the show does many things right to bring the audience into her corner. Woo is sweet, likable and ultimately relatable. Because she can’t really mask her autistic tendencies, we see her struggle when she tries to follow neurotypical rules for fitting in. I recognize a realistic spectrum of reactions in the people around her: sympathy, tolerance, bewilderment , supportiveness, frustration, exasperation, ableism, jealousy. Even with all she brings to the table, acceptance does not come easily.

Logo 2023-04-13 The Washington Post

Hart’s actual plot is slight, and it is possible that there was a tacit decision to keep all the parts that depend on unspoken sexual tension as brief as possible. After the inaugural olive-eating scene, in which Anna asks “Is that for me?” at the parliament party, and William pushes it into her mouth with a frankly bewildering lack of finesse from someone who has recently separated conjoined twins. Plus, the attempt at smouldering looks over the washing up in the Farrow kitchen after Anna meets her fiance’s parents for the first time.

Logo 2023-04-13 The Guardian

In Autumn 1945, Kit Quest is a young officer of the British army recruited by Intelligence services to root out a Nazi hiding amongst his Austrian relatives. Caught between black market dealers, the claims for justice from Jewish Survivors, his own family, Britain, and America, Kit’s bewildering search is reminiscent of The Third Man. (Incidentally, Sarah Gainham is Fleming’s tour guide to Berlin in Thrilling Cities.

Logo 2023-04-13 Literary Hub

Seydoux leads the audience deep into Sandra’s bewildering encounters with polar opposite emotions

Logo 2023-04-16 The Guardian

Eventually I became one – a writer – and was hired to adapt my memoir into a movie. Given that it was about how a dying psychiatrist changed my life after my hospitalisation for bipolar, it consisted mainly of two characters talking in rooms, so I was bewildered when the budget came in at {$}25m. There was a star comedian pitching hard for it as her first dramatic vehicle and a child actor pitching it as her adult crossover.

Logo 2023-04-17 The Guardian

The detail may be bewildering , but it’s not hard to see why all this happened. In any political system, the long dominance of one political party tends to breed complacency, arrogance and worse, because it no longer fears embarrassment or defeat.

Logo 2023-04-17 The Independent

What is the reader to make of all this? Such conflicts are the subject of Avocado Anxiety. Louise Gray was motivated to write her book by the bewilderment she felt when she started feeding her young daughter solids and realised she didn’t truly know where the food on supermarket shelves came from. She approaches the matter not as a campaigner or a medical professional but as a journalist and consumer. She has no skin in the game, and consequently is able to explore the nuances and complexities in a deeply relatable way.

Logo 2023-04-18 The Spectator

Dig back through the oligarch’s long history of court disputes in London, and it is in a 2008 high court ruling that his relationship with Ioannides first emerges. The judge, who appears to have been somewhat bewildered by the complexity of the offshore arrangements used by the oligarch, described what he had found during the course of the hearings.

Logo 2023-04-18 The Guardian

At first, he was bewildered . Mr. Kozlov is a 40-year old Russian-language teacher in the Lithuanian city of Kaunas. He has never had any dealings with terrorists.

Logo 2023-04-18 The New York Times

So, I found myself pinning my grief narrative – my mother’s illness and death – to something familiar: the levels and environments of Super Mario World. It’s become a kind of mnemonic device for me … the video game world became the bewildering world of grief; bright, overwhelming, symbolic.”.

Logo 2023-04-19 The Guardian

I met the seller in a multi-storey car park in Woolwich. He popped his trunk, revealing a jumble of metal tubing and cables about the size of a suitcase. As he lugged it onto the concrete floor, Taut explained that he loved the bike but had just bought a super-lightweight, modified Brompton. It was time to part ways. He encouraged me to unfold it as I stared, bewildered , at this miracle of engineering. ‘Open up the handlebar stem first,’ he said, ‘then unclip the seat post and raise it up to your hips’. We got there eventually.

Logo 2023-04-19 The Spectator

As the minute ticked down to 30 seconds and then to 10 seconds, eclipse-watchers were overcome with bewilderment .

Logo 2023-04-20 The Guardian

Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian echoed Marcos’ bewilderment that out of the four new Edca sites, none were being set up in the Bicol regions, which are often the hardest-hit areas by typhoons.

Logo 2023-04-20 Asia News Network

“Writing is control. The part of the university in which I teach should properly be called the Controlling Experience Department. Experience—mystifying, overwhelming, conscious, subconscious—rolls over everybody. We try to adapt, to learn, to accommodate, sometimes resisting, other times submitting to, whatever confronts us. But writers go further: they take this largely shapeless bewilderment and pour it into a mold of their own devising.”

Logo 2023-04-20 Literary Hub