confabulation

English

Etymology

From Middle English confabulacion (“conversation”),[1] from Latin confābulātiōnem, from cōnfābulārī + -tiōnem.[2]

Pronunciation

  • (Received Pronunciation, General American) IPA(key): /kənˌfæbjʊˈleɪʃən/
  • Audio (Southern England):(file)
  • Rhymes: -eɪʃən
  • Hyphenation: con‧fab‧u‧lat‧ion

Noun

confabulation (countable and uncountable, plural confabulations)

  1. A casual conversation; a chat.
    Synonym: confab
    • 1851 November 14, Herman Melville, “chapter 11”, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC:
      We had lain thus in bed, chatting and napping at short intervals, and Queequeg now and then affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs over mine, and then drawing them back; so entirely sociable and free and easy were we; when, at last, by reason of our confabulations, what little nappishness remained in us altogether departed, and we felt like getting up again, though day-break was yet some way down the future.
    • 1855 January 5, Anthony Trollope, The Warden, London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, →OCLC:
      […] Mrs Grantly was preparing herself for a grand attack which she was to make on her father, as agreed upon between herself and her husband during their curtain confabulation of that morning.
    • 1898, Henry James, The Turn of the Screw‎[1]:
      The schoolroom piano broke into all gruesome fancies; and when that failed there were confabulations in corners, with a sequel of one of them going out in the highest spirits in order to “come in” as something new.
    • 1920, Edith Wharton, chapter XXXIV, in The Age of Innocence, New York, N.Y.; London: D[aniel] Appleton and Company, →OCLC:
      The vision had roused a host of other associations, and he sat looking with new eyes at the library which, for over thirty years, had been the scene of his solitary musings and of all the family confabulations.
  2. (psychology) A fabricated memory believed to be true, especially in someone with dementia or with encephalopathy from advanced alcoholism.
    Coordinate term: hallucination
    • 2021, Pramod K. Nayar, Alzheimer's Disease Memoirs: Poetics of the Forgetting Self, Springer Nature, →ISBN, page 76:
      For Örulv and Hydén, confabulation is ‘world-making’ (669). What the person with AD chooses to enunciate, ‘may capture something important in the way the person makes sense of his or her life and also make meaning-based connections’ (Hydén and Örulv 2009: 206).
    • 2025 August 3, Adam Gabbatt, quoting Harry Segal, “‘He has trouble completing a thought’: bizarre public appearances again cast doubt on Trump’s mental acuity”, in Katharine Viner, editor, The Guardian‎[2], London: Guardian News & Media, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 17 October 2026:
      Segal said another characteristic of Trump’s questionable mental acuity is confabulation. “It’s where he takes an idea or something that’s happened and he adds to it things that have not happened.”
  3. (informal) An assertion, statement, or text generated by a generative AI that is presented by that AI as if it were true but is in fact a made-up, false notion.
    Synonym: hallucination

Derived terms

Translations

assertion, statement, or text generated by a generative AI

References

  1. ^ “confabūlāciōn, n.”, in MED Online, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, 2007.
  2. ^ “confabulation, n.”, in OED Online Paid subscription required⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1891; “confabulation, n.”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.
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