Definition

Confusing or perplexing, causing surprise or wonder

Pronunciation

US English

UK English


See Synonyms, Antonyms and Usage

Excerpts from News Articles

On January 1, 2021, one dollar was equivalent to 7.4 Turkish lire. With one week to go before the end of the year, the rate was 12.06 after reaching record lows above 18 to the dollar earlier in December. The currency's dramatic loss of value is emblematic of what has been a tough year for the economy of Turkey, where President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has confounded conventional wisdom in his attempts to turn things around.

Logo 2021-12-31 CGTN

Long COVID is still an unknown, and I think that's one of the biggest confounding factors of COVID-19. I have a lot of empathy for this person's spouse and for the letter writer who is ready to reintegrate into society. Humans as a species are not really designed to live in isolation. So after this many years, it can be incredibly traumatizing, isolating and burdensome, especially with children at home.

Logo 2023-02-07 NPR

At the risk of being pilloried as the Department of Crude Urban Stereotypes, we’ll admit we were astounded and confounded to read that one of our favorite federal data sets named Boston and Philadelphia as the most helpful major cities in America. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight A recent report found that the Northeastern duo — better known as places where people repeatedly punch police horses and sling racial slurs at athletes — have the highest “informal helping rate” among 12 large metros.

Logo 2023-03-31 The Washington Post

“The results here are scientifically interesting,” she added. “But research into the relationship between HRT, menopause and Alzheimer’s is beset by multiple small studies, all confounded by the different reasons people are prescribed HRT and accuracy of memory for menopause age and HRT use.

Logo 2023-04-03 CNN News

Milward throws the reader in at the deep end, with only a few attempts to provide translations (comparisons with A Clockwork Orange are unavoidable). There is a lot of sexual and scatological hilarity along the way, and depending on your temperament you may prefer to remain sheltered under Polari’s confounding blanket.

Logo 2023-04-03 The Spectator

If you’re confounded by filing your taxes, you may think it’s because you’re young and inexperienced. Nonsense. Tax filers of all ages get confused by tax rules and the intricacies of all the tax documents required. And it doesn’t help that tax provisions are tweaked frequently.

Logo 2023-04-03 CNN News

All of this is rather confounding and makes history awfully hard to learn. But maybe that’s just me! Maybe you are a superior human being and actually do know your history!

Logo 2023-04-04 The Washington Post

Gallants are struggling at the bottom of the league in South Africa but confounded expectation by qualifying for the group stage of the Confederation Cup and then going on to win their group.

Logo 2023-04-04 Channel NewsAsia

Legal experts who had awaited Bragg’s charging documents to resolve some of the lingering mysteries about the case remained confounded by some aspects of the prosecution.

Logo 2023-04-05 Politico

Rising sea levels could further confound the problem as saltwater is expected to seep into the water table, according to a World Bank analysis.

Logo 2023-04-06 EURO News

But it was also exhilarating and joyful, the way that a complete upending of ordinary life can be. It was oddly liberating to feel entirely at sea, to be forced to live minute to minute, to think I had it right—whether “it” was a feeding schedule or a sleep routine—only to be utterly confounded at the next turn. Humbled, crushed, full of fear and awe in the same breath, oh, like any new parents, there were times when we felt brought to our knees.

Logo 2023-04-10 Literary Hub

In Christopher Nolan’s puzzle film Memento (2000), Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) is the amnesiac captive of a revenge narrative he barely comprehends. Nolan’s confounding circular design has Leonard pursuing himself, as both perpetrator and avenger, in perhaps the surest cinematic examination of revenge’s futility.

Logo 2023-04-10 The Conversation

This is a question that's independent of other, potentially confounding factors like what the bat's made of, alterations to baseball stitching, or whether players were doping.

Logo 2023-04-12 NPR

The car is fully-armoured with tires designed to keep the car moving even if all four wheels take incoming gunfire. It has night-vision capabilities, and can dispense smoke screens and oil slicks to confound anyone bent on pursuing it.

Logo 2023-04-12 The Independent

Warren Buffett said he was " confounded " by the opportunity to buy into five Japanese trading houses two years ago.

Logo 2023-04-12 CNBC

That may lift emissions even higher, and confound expectations for drops in fossil fuel pollution levels going forward.

Logo 2023-04-13 Reuters

Since roughly the 1920s, farmers had known of a confounding disease that threatened their potatoes, leaving them shrunken and malformed and reducing the size of a crop by 50 percent or more. In the 1960s and 1970s, according to a report in Forbes magazine, as many as half of the potato plants in some areas of China and Ukraine were sickened.

Logo 2023-04-13 The Washington Post

Berkshire Hathaway 's Warren Buffett is in Japan and recently revealed that he raised his stakes in the country's top trading houses, saying he was " confounded " by the opportunity to buy them two years ago. The five companies — Mitsubishi Corp.

Logo 2023-04-13 CNBC

Where Gego’s abstract sculptures express the modernist dream of simplicity, Sze takes confounding complexity as a given — as something to embrace. That’s part of what makes her one of the most interesting artists alive. Her show, organized by Kyung An, announces that things, from the beginning, are in a state of constant change and near anarchy. Systems exist, but so does entropy. Time is out of joint, coherence elusive, nothing commensurate, everything unbalanced. Adorno was right: The only solutions are false.

Logo 2023-04-14 The Washington Post

Amorth said 98% of the people who came to him needed a psychiatrist, not an exorcist, a detail Crowe’s Amorth clarifies in the film. When a cardinal asks him about the remaining 2%, he says: “Ah, the other 2% — this is something that has confounded all of science and all of medicine for a very long time.” He adds after a dramatic pause: “I call it evil.”

Logo 2023-04-14 Associated Press

Further confounding the situation, a judge in Washington last week declared mifepristone “safe and effective” and ordered the FDA not to restrict its availability in 17 Democrat-run states.

Logo 2023-04-14 RT News

I loved them then and was excited to revisit these books in the course of my research for The Possibility of Life. A scene from Cosmos had stayed with me—and confounded me—for almost twenty years, and I was ready to make new sense of it. But when I got to the place in the book where the scene should have been, the chapter just ended.

Logo 2023-04-18 Literary Hub

Detective shows need to have at least one of two things: clever plots to confound us, or a world we want to live in. If the mystery is a doozy, a personality-free investigator isn’t always a dealbreaker. If you’re enjoying spending time with the sleuths, whodunnit doesn’t necessarily matter. Will Trent, a breezy escape of a cop show, is in the second category.

Logo 2023-04-18 The Guardian

Many solicitors do things in their own way and are slow to change, plus conveyancing has always been viewed as towards the bottom of the legal food chain. There’s also a preponderance of huge call centre-style firms handling too many files to sustainably keep an eye on them. What’s more, many estate agents view promoting legal services as a vital source of income. In my day having a good solicitor was a Godsend – why on earth would you recommend a duffer? – but that logic seems to have been confounded by referral fees.

Logo 2023-04-19 The Spectator

A year into the war, despite suffering months of artillery and rocket strikes at the hands of the Russian military, some residents of towns along the front line in eastern Ukraine still confound officials and the police with their support for Russia.

Logo 2023-04-19 The New York Times

The study was observational, so the findings cannot be viewed through a lens of cause and effect. However, the authors “carried out detailed, repeated collection of dietary data, followed-up participants for nearly two decades, applied comprehensive adjustments for confounding factors, and conducted 12 different sensitivity analyses,” said Forouhi, who was not involved in the study.

Logo 2023-04-19 CNN News

What has confounded many in the party is that an abortion position in a primary that appeals to the Republican base could be damaging in a general election.

Logo 2023-04-20 The Washington Post

At this point, some might say it looks like he bought Twitter on a wing and a prayer – remember he tried to back out but ultimately couldn't – which makes the snubbing of the Pope all the more confounding .

Logo 2023-04-21 The Register

He confounds . He says the problem is X when it’s actually Y.

Logo 2023-04-22 The Spectator

“What might she have written next?” asked Margaret Atwood in her tribute to Hilary Mantel, after the Booker prize-winning novelist’s sudden death in September last year. “I don’t know, but I will miss it.” In this, she spoke for readers around the world, eagerly awaiting a new book from the author of the Wolf Hall trilogy. Aside from her Cromwell novels, Mantel had a habit of confounding expectations, with each new work so different from its predecessor.

Logo 2023-04-22 The Guardian

It's often said markets will move in a manner that confounds the greatest number of investors, and that is what is happening in 2023. U.

Logo 2023-04-24 CNBC

When she relinquished the job she loved, Chopp fell into deep despair, confounded by the prescription given to her by an empathetic doctor: “Live with joy!” She had nightmares about going insane. But eventually, she began to push back against the darkness.

Logo 2023-04-24 The Washington Post

And yet, the medically gendered origin of the skein is still the albatross around The Power’s neck. Because Ryan and his atypical estrogen levels are the only meaningful swing the series takes at interrogating what, with humanity being as biologically, culturally, and socially complex as it is, the broader effects of an estrogen-fueled electrical evolution might actually be. Which, here in the ninth year of the Right’s escalating war against trans existence, isn’t just confounding , but a failure of thoughtful storytelling.

Logo 2023-04-24 Literary Hub

Oil prices have confounded expectations in the first quarter of 2023. Brent – a major global benchmark – hit a low of US{$}72 (£58) a barrel on March 17, while the world’s other main benchmark, WTI, dropped to less than US{$}66 a barrel. This is a far cry from the nearly US{$}114 and US{$}103 a barrel, respectively, reached on the same day a year before following the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, a major oil producer.

Logo 2023-04-25 The Conversation

For better or worse, the term “Generation of ’68” was defined by the publication of Tranter’s anthology The New Australian Poetry (1979). The book undoubtedly aided the careers of some poets, but came in for harsh criticism. The selection favoured writers from Sydney and Melbourne, and included a mere two women among its 24 contributors. Many of the names commonly associated with the group are missing. Ken Bolton and Pam Brown, in particular, are confounding omissions.

Logo 2023-04-26 The Conversation