obfuscate

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for November 29, 2024 is:

obfuscate • \AHB-fuh-skayt\ • verb

To obfuscate something is to make it more difficult to understand. Obfuscate can also mean “to be evasive, unclear, or confusing.”

// The revised wording of the rule obfuscates its meaning.

// They allege that the company’s representative lied and obfuscated when answering questions about the report.

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Examples:

“‘I firmly believe that cyber-insecurity is fundamentally a policy problem,’ says Brett Callow, a threat analyst at the security firm Emsisoft. ‘We need standardized and uniform disclosure and reporting laws, prescribed language for those disclosures and reports, regulation and licensing of negotiators. Far too much happens in the shadows or is obfuscated by weasel words. It’s counterproductive and helps only the cybercriminals.’” — Lily Hay Newman, WIRED, 5 Dec. 2023

Did you know?

“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.