confuse

confuse 1 Confuse, muddle, addle, fuddle, befuddle mean to throw one out mentally so that one cannot think clearly or act intelligently.

Confuse usually implies intense embarrassment or bewilderment

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you confuse me, and how can I transact business if I am confused? Let us be clearheaded— Dickens

}

Muddle often suggests stupefaction (as by drink) and usually implies blundering, aimless, but not necessarily unsuccessful attempts to deal with ideas, situations, or tasks beyond one's powers of analysis or one's capacity

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a subject so abstruse as to muddle the brains of all but exceptional students

}

{

we have muddled through so often that we have come half to believe in a providence which watches over unintelligent virtue— Inge

}

Addle suggests staleness or emptiness of mind and resulting mental impotence

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I have addled my head with writing all day— Dickens

}

Fuddle and the more common befuddle imply confusion from or as if from tippling or indulgence in a drug that clouds the mind and makes one's thinking and speech absurdly incoherent

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Shakespeare's Falstaff is most amusing when he is completely befuddled

}

{

corridors, archways, recesses . . . combined to fuddle any sense of direction— Elizabeth Bowen

}

{

perhaps his best would be a little better if he didn't befuddle his mind with . . . slander— Frank

}

Analogous words: confound, bewilder, mystify, perplex, *puzzle: discomfit, disconcert, faze, rattle (see EMBARRASS): fluster, flurry (see DISCOMPOSE)

Antonyms: enlighten

2 *mistake, confound

Antonyms: differentiate