Word.ws English Dictionary

confab

Syllables: con·fab/ˈkɒnfæb/US/kənˈfæb/

confab is the clipping of confabulation.

confab is the clipping of confabulate.

Meaning of confabulation

Noun

confabulation (countable and uncountable, plural confabulations)

  1. A casual conversation; a chat.
    • […] Mrs Grantly was preparing herself for a grand attack which she was to make on her father, as agreed upon between herself and her husband during their curtain confabulation of that morning.1855 January 5, Anthony Trollope, The Warden, London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, →OCLC
    Synonyms:
    confab
  2. A fabricated memory believed to be true, especially in someone with dementia or with encephalopathy from advanced alcoholism.
    • For Örulv and Hydén, confabulation is ‘world-making’ (669). What the person with AD chooses to enunciate, ‘may capture something important in the way the person makes sense of his or her life and also make meaning-based connections’ (Hydén and Örulv 2009: 206).2021, Pramod K. Nayar, Alzheimer's Disease Memoirs: Poetics of the Forgetting Self, Springer Nature, →ISBN, page 76
  3. (informal) An assertion, statement, or text generated by a generative AI that is presented by that AI as if it were true but is in fact a made-up, false notion.
    Synonyms:
    hallucination

Meaning of confabulate

Verb

confabulate (third-person singular simple present confabulates, present participle confabulating, simple past and past participle confabulated)

  1. (intransitive) To speak casually with; to chat.
  2. (intransitive) To confer.
  3. (ambitransitive) To fabricate memories in order to fill gaps in one's memory.
    • "It has been well established that the speech areas in the absence of input often confabulate a response."1991, George P. Prigatano Chairman, Daniel L. Schacter, Awareness of Deficit after Brain Injury: Clinical and Theoretical Issues ...

Synonyms of confab

5 more synonymsFewer synonyms

Forms of confab

Noun
pluralconfabs
Verb
third-person singular presentconfabs
present participleconfabbing
past participleconfabbed
pastconfabbed

Origin of confab

Clipping of confabulation, from Middle English confabulacion (“conversation”), from Latin confābulātiōnem, from cōnfābulārī + -tiōnem (suffix forming nouns relating to actions or their results); see further at etymology 2.

Clipping of confabulate, from Latin cōnfābulārī + English -ate (suffix forming verbs with the sense of acting in the specified manner). Cōnfābulārī is the present active infinitive of cōnfābulor (“to converse; to discuss”), from con- (prefix indicating a bringing together) + fābulor (“to chat, converse, talk; to make up a story”) (from fābula (“discourse, narrative; fable, story”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *bʰeh₂- (“to say, speak”)) + for (“to say, speak, talk”)).

Words that rhyme with confab

17 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about confab

What is confab the clipping of?
Confab is the clipping of confabulation.
How do you pronounce confab?
Confab is pronounced /ˈkɒnfæb/ (UK).

Words near confab in the dictionary

  1. coney-catcher
  2. coney-catching
  3. coneys
  4. conf
  5. conf.
  6. confab
  7. confabbed
  8. confabbing
  9. confabs
  10. confabular
  11. confabulate

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: confab (page history and authors); confabulation (page history and authors); confabulate (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-confab.wav.

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