Word.ws English Dictionary

bedunce

bedunce verb: to treat as, or reduce to, a dunce; to make stupid.

Verb

bedunce (third-person singular simple present bedunces, present participle beduncing, simple past and past participle bedunced)

  1. (archaic, rare, transitive) To treat as, or reduce to, a dunce; to make stupid.
    • After he has sufficiently bedunced us through several pages, he at last has the tenderness to answer to our particular objections, and that with sufficient perplexity.1866, Oliver Goldsmith, The Miscellaneous Works of Oliver Goldsmith, page 515
    • […] reamsful of financial or statistical calculations; the figures of which, when duly emitted in the House, sufficed to bedunce the brains of five hundred wiser men; […]1843, Catherine Grace Frances Gore, The Birthright, page 98

Forms of bedunce

third-person singular presentbedunces
present participlebeduncing
past participlebedunced
pastbedunced

Origin of bedunce

From be- + dunce.

Questions about bedunce

What does bedunce mean?
Bedunce means to treat as, or reduce to, a dunce; to make stupid.
What part of speech is bedunce?
Bedunce is a verb.
What is the past tense of bedunce?
The past tense of bedunce is bedunced.

Words near bedunce in the dictionary

  1. beduking
  2. bedumb
  3. bedumbed
  4. bedumbing
  5. bedumbs
  6. bedunce
  7. bedunced
  8. bedunces
  9. beduncing
  10. bedung
  11. bedunged

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bedunce (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “bedunce.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bedunce. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.