confabulation

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

• (Received Pronunciation, General American) IPA^(key): /kənˌfæbjʊˈleɪʃən/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -eɪʃən
• Hyphenation: con‧fab‧u‧lat‧ion

confabulation (countable and uncountable, plural confabulations)

1. A casual conversation; a chat.

   Synonym: confab

   • 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 suffering from dementia.
   • 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 The Guardian‎^[2], →ISSN:

     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.”

• confab (noun)