How to use conflate in a sentence

18 example sentences · verb, adjective, noun

Conflate means to combine or mix together. Example: ““Bacon was Lord Chancellor of England and the first European to experiment with gunpowder.” — “No, you are conflating Francis Bacon and Roger Bacon.””

Examples of conflate by meaning

verbTo fail to properly distinguish or keep separate (things); to mistakenly treat (them) as equivalent.

“Bacon was Lord Chancellor of England and the first European to experiment with gunpowder.” — “No, you are conflating Francis Bacon and Roger Bacon.”
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

verbTo deliberately draw a false equivalence or association, typically in a tacit or implicit manner as propaganda and/or...

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
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

adjectiveCombining 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

More sentences with conflate

Do not conflate the officeholder with the office; the distinction sometimes matters.From the entry office
Scribes sometimes conflated Aelia Eudocia and Aelia Eudoxia.From the entry Eudocia
Conflating veganism with vegetarianism and rawism is unnecessarily confusing and distracting.2013, Kim Socha, Sarahjane Blum, Confronting Animal Exploitation, page 107. From the entry rawism
How did the two get conflated into a shared vision of beauty?2006, H. Peter Steeves, The Things Themselves, page 75. From the entry ab
I don’t let anyone conflate “American cheese” with Kraft Singles—not when there is so much good craft cheese being made stateside.2026 February 25, Tenaya Darlington, “American Whey: With artisan cheesemakers in every corner of the country, there’s never been a better…. From the entry turophile
Similar rhetoric made its way into our mayoral race as candidates and community members also began to conflate masks and violent crime.2023 June 1, Ernest Owens, “Banning "Shiesty" Ski Masks on SEPTA Won't Reduce Crime”, in Philadelphia, archived from the original on 01…. From the entry shiesty
But that should not be confused or conflated with citizenship, for, according to Jebb, "citizenship includes subjecthood, but subjecthood does not include citizenship."2010, Sukanya Banerjee, “Introduction”, in Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire, →ISBN, page 25. From the entry subjecthood
Haynes's formulation all but conflated middle-class status with moral integrity, as he implied that by their nature, the better classes were more selfsecure.2008, Touré F. Reed, Not Alms But Opportunity. From the entry selfsecure
Wiley was the creator of Eskibeat riddim tracks (that were conflated with Grime) that were named after things associated with cold, such as Eskimo and Igloo.2016, Kehinde Andrews, Lisa Amanda Palmer, Blackness in Britain, page 93. From the entry Eskibeat
By conflating names of various lakes and rivers so as to redefine the course of the Tanaïs, these accounts play with the imaginary boundaries between Asia and Europe.2010, Zachary Sng, The Rhetoric of Error from Locke to Kleist, page 158. From the entry Tanaïs
Devlin's writings had fragmented the conservative position by conflating harm and morality, and had significantly ambiguated the conception of harm at the heart of the debate.2001, Bernard E. Harcourt, chapter 7, in Illusion of Order. From the entry ambiguate
Sam's error is to conflate appearance and identity, to presume that a silver coat, black stilettos and red hair signify the person (Allie) he recognises from that collection of signs.2012, Stella Bruzzi, Undressing Cinema: Clothing and identity in the movies, →ISBN, page 143. From the entry segregationalism

Meaning of conflate

verb To combine or mix together.
verb To fail to properly distinguish or keep separate (things); to mistakenly treat (them) as equivalent.
verb 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.

Full definition of conflate

Questions about conflate in a sentence

How do you use conflate in a sentence?: Conflate is used as a verb, adjective and noun. For example: ““Bacon was Lord Chancellor of England and the first European to experiment with gunpowder.” — “No, you are conflating Francis Bacon and Roger Bacon.””
What is a short sentence with conflate?: “Scribes sometimes conflated Aelia Eudocia and Aelia Eudoxia.”
What does conflate mean?: Conflate means to combine or mix together.

Adapted from Wiktionary: conflate (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

Cite this page: “How to use conflate in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/conflate. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.