Third person singular present tense: to combine two or more things, especially ideas or texts, into one unified whole.
From Latin conflāre meaning 'to blow together' or 'to fuse by heat,' from con- (together) and flāre (to blow). The meaning evolved from physical fusing to combining concepts.
Politicians and media experts love to conflate similar ideas to make complex topics simpler—'climate change and weather' or 'freedom and anarchy'—but conflating different things often destroys the nuance we need to understand problems.
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