confabulate

Other forms of confabulate

past tense

confabulated·

present participle

confabulating·

third person

confabulates·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about confabulate

What does confabulate mean?

confabulate means "unconsciously replace fact with fantasy in one's memory". That is the primary sense; the word has 3 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in confabulate?

confabulate has 4 syllables: con-fa-bu-late. The stress falls on "fa".

What is another word for confabulate?

Close synonyms include chew the fat, shoot the breeze, chat, confab, chitchat. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is confabulate a common word?

confabulate is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.