Present participle: the act of combining or merging two or more separate things into one.
From conflate in its present participle form, following the standard English pattern of adding -ing to verbs. The root remains Latin conflāre.
The act of conflating is so common in how we think that linguists call it a 'productive error'—our brains naturally merge similar concepts, which is why people conflate 'debt' and 'deficit' even though they're completely different.
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