Conflate: meaning, example and synonyms
Conflatev. To combine two or more distinct ideas or things into one, often mistakenly.
Example
The essay's central error is to conflate correlation with causation, treating the towns' shared rise in income and literacy as proof that one produced the other.
- Part of speech
- verb
- Synonyms
- confuse, merge, fuse, blend
- Antonyms
- distinguish, separate, differentiate
- Memory tip
- con (together) + flare (blow): two ideas blown together into one.
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Check yourself: Conflate in context
Careless readers often ______ the narrator with the author, assuming that every opinion voiced by the fictional speaker reflects the writer's own beliefs.
Answer: conflate. Treating the narrator and author as one person is merging two distinct things. mollify (soothe), disengage (withdraw) and swoon (be overcome with emotion) don't fit.
The report was faulted for ______ two distinct problems, lumping together traffic congestion and air pollution as if solving one would automatically solve the other.
Answer: conflating. 'Lumping together' two distinct problems is conflating them. mollifying (soothe), swooning (be overcome with emotion) and reciprocating (return in kind) don't fit.