confute

From Middle French confuter, from Latin confūtō.

• (UK) IPA^(key): /kənˈfjuːt/

• Audio (Southern England):

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confute (third-person singular simple present confutes, present participle confuting, simple past and past participle confuted)

1. (transitive, now rare) To show (something or someone) to be false or wrong; to disprove or refute.
   • 1593, Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence:

     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 […] .

   • 1644, John Milton, Areopagitica:

     bad books [...] to a discreet and judicious Reader serve in many respects to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate.

   • 1767, David Cranz, A History of Greenland:

     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.

   • 1959, Noam Chomsky, Review of Verbal behavior, in Language, volume 35, number 1, page 41:

     We can look up something in a book and learn it perfectly well with no other motive than to confute reinforcement theory, or out of boredom, or idle curiosity.