Word Direct Answers

What does "baffle" mean?

Baffle: To check by shifts and turns; to elude; to foil. The art that baffles time's tyrannic claim. Cowper.

Additional senses

  1. 2.To check by perplexing; to disconcert, frustrate, or defeat; to thwart. "A baffled purpose." De Quincey. A suitable scripture ready to repel and baffle them all. South. Calculations so difficult as to have baffled, until within a . . . recent period, the most enlightened nations. Prescott. The mere intricacy of a question should not baffle us. Locke. Baffling wind (Naut.), one that frequently shifts from one point to another.
  2. 3.To practice deceit. [Obs.] Barrow.
  3. 4.To struggle against in vain; as, a ship baffles with the winds. [R.]
  4. 5.A defeat by artifice, shifts, and turns; discomfiture. [R.] "A baffle to philosophy." South.

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