conflate
UK/kənˈfleɪt//kənˈfleɪt/
conflate verb: to combine or mix together.
Verb
conflate (third-person singular simple present conflates, present participle conflating, simple past and past participle conflated)
- To combine or mix together.
- To fail to properly distinguish or keep separate (things); to mistakenly treat (them) as equivalent.
- Near-synonym: confuse
- “Bacon was Lord Chancellor of England and the first European to experiment with gunpowder.” — “No, you are conflating Francis Bacon and Roger Bacon.”
- Synonyms:
- mix up, lump together
- To deliberately draw a false equivalence or association, typically in a tacit or implicit manner as propaganda and/or an intentional distortion or misrepresentation of the subject matter.
- But in reality, the order simply furthers the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies by continuing to conflate immigration issues with criminal ones.2018 June 25, Shan Wu, “The real story behind Trump’s immigration executive order”, in CNN
- But again, this conflates global geographic variation with race, says Alan Goodman, a biological anthropologist at Hampshire College.2020 August 18, “Your big questions about race, answered”, in CNN
Adjective
conflate (not comparable)
- Combining elements from multiple versions of the same text.
- Why the redactor created this conflate version, despite its inconsistencies, is a matter of conjecture.1999, Emanuel Tov, The Greek and Hebrew Bible: Collected Essays on the Septuagint
Noun
conflate (plural conflates)
- A conflate text, one which conflates multiple version of a text together.
conflate meaning in Urdu and Kannada
conflate in Urdu
- ملانا, جوڑنا, مخلوط کرنا
conflate in Kannada
- ಸಂಯೋಜಿಸು, ಒಟ್ಟಗೆ ಬೆಸೆ, ಸಮನ್ವಯಗೊಳಿಸು
Examples of conflate in a sentence
- But as Covid wore on, and all of this not-really-reading took on an ever more breathless quality, it became clear that we were being not confused but conflated, treated as one interchangeable Naomi.2023, Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, Penguin, →ISBN, page 39:
- Climate skeptics have conflated the two for years, for example, pointing to cold winter weather as proof that global warming is a hoax, most likely to play on people’s confusion about the two.2020 September 15, Brandon Miller and Judson Jones, “Climate is not weather: Trump continues to get the two conflated”, in CNN:
Synonyms of conflate
2 more synonymsFewer synonyms
Forms of conflate
| Verb | |
|---|---|
| third-person singular present | conflates |
| present participle | conflating |
| past participle | conflated |
| past | conflated |
| Noun | |
| plural | conflates |
Origin of conflate
Attested since 1541: from Latin cōnflātus, past passive participle of cōnflō (“fuse, kindle, blow together”), see -ate (verb-forming suffix).
Words formed from conflate
Words that rhyme with conflate
48 more rhymesFewer rhymes
- mate
- late
- bate
- create
- date
- relate
- vibrate
- wait
- deflate
- fate
- migrate
- rebate
- rotate
- strait
- supererogate
- translocate
- await
- eight
- freight
- skate
- alternate
- collate
- debate
- inflate
- sedate
- update
- compensate
- delate
- dilate
- fixate
- grate
- Haight
- hate
- implicate
- innate
- intercalate
- locate
- mandate
- negate
- overweight
- pinnate
- quadrate
- tate
- vacate
- aerate
- calibrate
- castrate
- crate
Questions about conflate
- What does conflate mean?
- Conflate means to combine or mix together.
- What is conflate in Urdu?
- Conflate in Urdu is ملانا, جوڑنا, مخلوط کرنا. See Conflate meaning in Urdu.
- How do you use conflate in a sentence?
- But as Covid wore on, and all of this not-really-reading took on an ever more breathless quality, it became clear that we were being not confused but conflated, treated as one interchangeable Naomi.
- What part of speech is conflate?
- Conflate can be a verb, an adjective or a noun.
- How do you pronounce conflate?
- Conflate is pronounced /kənˈfleɪt/ (UK).
- What is the past tense of conflate?
- The past tense of conflate is conflated.
Words near conflate in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: conflate (page history and authors); conflate (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); conflate (Kannada Wiktionary) (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.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-conflate.ogg.
Cite this entry: “conflate.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/conflate. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.