All 8 Uses of
confound
in
Moby Dick
- But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast.†
Chpt 1-3
- Ignorance is the parent of fear, and being completely nonplussed and confounded about the stranger, I confess I was now as much afraid of him as if it was the devil himself who had thus broken into my room at the dead of night.†
Chpt 1-3
- I knew not how this consciousness at last glided away from me; but waking in the morning, I shudderingly remembered it all, and for days and weeks and months afterwards I lost myself in confounding attempts to explain the mystery.†
Chpt 4-6
- And thinks I to myself all the while, mind, while I was stubbing my silly toes against that cursed pyramid—so confoundedly contradictory was it all, all the while, I say, I was thinking to myself, 'what's his leg now, but a cane—a whalebone cane.†
Chpt 31-33
- Yet is it bright with many a gem; I the wearer, see not its far flashings; but darkly feel that I wear that, that dazzlingly confounds.†
Chpt 37-39 *
- Indeed, place this reversed skull (scaled down to the human magnitude) among a plate of men's skulls, and you would involuntarily confound it with them; and remarking the depressions on one part of its summit, in phrenological phrase you would say—This man had no self-esteem, and no veneration.†
Chpt 79-81
- Upon this every soul was confounded; for the phenomenon just then observed by Ahab had unaccountably escaped every one else; but its very blinding palpableness must have been the cause.†
Chpt 124-126
- We work by the month, or by the job, or by the profit; not for us to ask the why and wherefore of our work, unless it be too confounded cobbling, and then we stash it if we can.†
Chpt 124-126
Definition:
-
(confound) to confuse, prove wrong, frustrate, or express frustrationin various senses, including:
confuse or surprise -- sometimes specifically to confuse one thing with another
- "confounded by the puzzle" -- confused or perplexed
- "Test results confounded the experts." -- surprised and confused
- "Do not confound confidence with correctness." -- mistake one thing for another
prove wrong, defeat, or frustrate
- "The test results confounded my theory." -- proved wrong
- "Their defense confounded our offense." -- defeated or frustrated
make worse
- "She confounded the problem by painting without sanding." -- made worse
- "The task is complicated by other confounding factors." -- making worse
an exclamation expressing anger or frustration
- "Confound it! Will I ever get this thing to work?"
- "I don't understand the confounded directions!"