Confront
verbTo face or deal with a difficult person, problem, or situation directly.
How to spell confront
8 letters · 2 syllables
How to pronounce confront
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does confront mean?
- verbTo face or deal with a difficult person, problem, or situation directly.
Confront in a sentence
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She decided to confront her manager about the unpaid overtime.
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The report forces the company to confront years of poor accounting.
Where does confront come from?
Language of origin: Latin
Confront comes from the Medieval Latin verb confrontare, meaning 'to set face to face' or 'to put a boundary against'. It was built from the prefix con-, meaning 'together' or 'with', and the noun frons, frontis, which literally meant 'forehead' or 'the front of the head', and by extension the front rank or face of anything. English borrowed it in the late 1500s by way of Middle French confronter, originally with the sense of comparing two things side by side, like comparing the texts of two documents. The meaning of facing someone in hostility or boldly tackling a problem developed soon afterward. The same Latin frons survives in everyday English words such as 'front', 'frontier', and 'affront', which is why the spelling keeps the single -front- core intact.
How the word is built
- con- (together)
- front (forehead/face, from Latin frons)
- -t (verb formation via French)
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