Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- intransitive verb To talk casually; chat.
- intransitive verb Psychology To fill in gaps in one's memory with fabrications that one believes to be facts.
from The Century Dictionary.
- To talk familiarly together; chat; prattle.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- intransitive verb To talk familiarly together; to chat; to prattle.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- verb intransitive To
speak casually with; tochat . - verb intransitive To
confer . - verb intransitive, psychology To
fabricate memories in order to fill gaps in one'smemory .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- verb have a conference in order to talk something over
- verb unconsciously replace fact with fantasy in one's memory
- verb talk socially without exchanging too much information
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
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Examples
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I sketch rather than describe in detail, letting the readers confabulate to fill in the whole picture.
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Rogue artists who confabulate our notions of what art is and isn't are always going to come along, and we should be grateful for them, even encourage them.
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Here are the facts that Spencer has managed to confabulate on his website's rendition of events:
Ahmed Rehab: The Islam-Basher and the Librarian Kerfuffle 2009
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I simply think she should not confabulate and reinvent her position.
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Now you can confabulate about the inner workings of his mind when he composed Quixote if you want.
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Henry Sidgwick, you are not only highly selective in the questions you choose to answer, you evade answering the questions, prevaricate and confabulate.
John Terry’s sacking as England captain tells us something interesting... 2009
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People who confabulate are confronted directly often lash out at their questioners, which in President Bush's case could be a disaster for us all.
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AP has the right, with the First Amendment, to report like this, and the crazy congressman has the right to confabulate his fantasies about Obama.
GA Republican Rep. Broun and AP Confabulating a-- Folie � deux? 2008
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In order to justify their behavior they confabulate, make up a variety of lies in order to manage real and imagined questioning.
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AP has the right, with the First Amendment, to report like this, and the crazy congressman has the right to confabulate his fantasies about Obama.
Printing: GA Republican Rep. Broun and AP Confabulating a-- Folie � deux? 2008
bookhling commented on the word confabulate
Some people mistake their capacity for confabulating the truth with superb reasoning.
August 18, 2008