Word.ws English Dictionary

bemuddle

bemuddle verb: to confuse, distort.

Verb

bemuddle (third-person singular simple present bemuddles, present participle bemuddling, simple past and past participle bemuddled)

  1. (archaic) to confuse, distort
    • He is swallowed up, body and soul, in law; he eats, drinks, plays (at the card table) Law, nothing but Law. He acts Ignoramus in the play so thoroughly, that you w'd swear that in the inmost marrow of his head (is not this the proper anatomical term?) there have housed themselves not devils but...1822, Charles and Mary Lamb, The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6)
    • Its educational value is far higher than that of the newspaper, which, in spite of its many merits as a diffuser of information, is very apt to do its best to bemuddle and sophisticate plain facts.1890, John Fiske, Civil Government in the United States Considered with

Forms of bemuddle

third-person singular presentbemuddles
present participlebemuddling
past participlebemuddled
pastbemuddled

Origin of bemuddle

From be- + muddle.

Words formed from bemuddle

Questions about bemuddle

What does bemuddle mean?
Bemuddle means to confuse, distort.
What part of speech is bemuddle?
Bemuddle is a verb.
What is the past tense of bemuddle?
The past tense of bemuddle is bemuddled.

Words near bemuddle in the dictionary

  1. bemud
  2. bemudded
  3. bemuddied
  4. bemuddies
  5. bemudding
  6. bemuddle
  7. bemuddled
  8. bemuddlement
  9. bemuddles
  10. bemuddling
  11. bemuddy

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bemuddle (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: “bemuddle.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bemuddle. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.