obfuscate
verb
Mary Carroll
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Try to Understand the Roots of Obfuscate
“Hello darkness, my old friend / I’ve come to talk with you again.” So begins the classic 1960s Simon and Garfunkel song “The Sound of Silence,” which was written by Paul Simon with a seemingly oxymoronic title that has obfuscated—that is, confused—ten thousand people, maybe more (probably a lot more) in the decades since. It confuses us too, but we’re not above being oxymoronic ourselves when we say that darkness, our old friend, shines a helpful light on the meaning of the word obfuscate. When obfuscate first came into use in the early 16th century, it was with the meaning “to throw into shadow.” This makes sense, since the word comes from the Latin obfuscāre (“to obscure or darken”) which itself comes in part from fuscus (“dark-colored”). The word was used for both figurative and literal darkening before developing the even more figurative senses of “to make more difficult to understand,” “to be evasive or unclear,” and “to confuse,” which in modern use are now more common.
Examples of obfuscate in a Sentence
Zach Montague, New York Times, 19 Feb. 2025
More alarming, the Post found evidence that Gabbard tried to obfuscate details about the nature of her encounters with the Syrian dictator from congressional investigators and may have lied to her staff.
—Shane Harris, The Atlantic, 12 Feb. 2025
The backlash to Gibson’s revelation was swift, but the influencer continued to obfuscate details about her health.
—Ct Jones, Rolling Stone, 8 Feb. 2025
On the input side, these classifiers surround each query with a set of templates describing in detail what kind of harmful information to look out for, as well as the ways a user might try to obfuscate or encode requests for that information.
—Ars Technica, 3 Feb. 2025
See All Example Sentences for obfuscate
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Cite this Entry
“Obfuscate.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/obfuscate. Accessed 2 Mar. 2025.
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