Baffling

How to spell baffling

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce baffling

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does baffling mean?

1. adjectiveImpossible to understand or explain; deeply confusing.

Baffling in a sentence

• The new tax form was so baffling that she hired an accountant.

• Engineers found the recurring fault genuinely baffling after weeks of testing.

Where does baffling come from?

Language of origin: Unknown

This word is the present participle of the verb baffle, whose precise origins are genuinely murky. The verb appears in English in the 1500s, where it first meant to publicly disgrace or humiliate someone, especially a perjured knight, before softening into the modern sense of bewildering or thwarting. One plausible line traces it to the Scots word bauchle, meaning to treat with contempt or to disgrace publicly, while another connects it to the Old French bafouer, meaning to mock or deceive. Because the trail is so uncertain, scholars have never settled the matter, which is why dictionaries hedge on its true parentage. The double f in the spelling reflects the short, stressed vowel in baff-, the same pattern that gives us scuffle and shuffle, and that doubling is exactly where careful writers should focus.

How the word is built

• baffl- (from the verb baffle: to confuse or frustrate)
• -ing (present participle/adjective suffix)