mystifyv.

1806 tr. L. Dutens Mem. Traveller III. x. 174 He told me that..people no longer jeered, but amused themselves in mystifying. As this term was not in the dictionaries, I begged him to explain it to me. ‘To..mystify is to make a man believe absurd things, and to render him a dupe to his credulity.’

1814 W. Hazlitt Polit. Ess. (1819) 73 The noble Secretary mistified the house, as he had himself been mistified by his highness of Benevento.

1863 C. C. Clarke Shakespeare-characters 200 She has a tilt at him, jeering, joking, mystifying, obfuscating him.

1873 W. H. Dixon Hist. Two Queens I. iv. vii. 218 Puebla was to choose his words—to hint at dark intrigues—to mystify the council.

1920 D. H. Lawrence Women in Love xxix. 456 Loerke was everywhere at once, like a gnome,..confusing and mystifying the waiter.

1983 A. Bullock Ernest Bevin iii. 108 He took a similar childlike delight in mystifying his officials when, to their disbelief, he forecast the resignation of de Gaulle in 1946 two or three weeks before it occurred.

1994 W. Ranade Future for NHS? (BNC) 14 Illich claims that doctors have done much to mystify the public about the real causes of ill-health.

1819 Ld. Byron Don Juan: Canto II xii. 125 I recollect Great Britain's coast looks white, But almost every other country's blue, When gazing on them, mystified by distance, We enter on our nautical existence. So Juan stood, bewilder'd, on the deck.

1836 C. Dickens Pickwick Papers (1837) iii. 32 Mr. Pickwick, who was considerably mystified by this very unpolite by-play.

1841 N. Amer. Rev. Apr. 537 Their merit will astonish and mistify all readers, whose notions of a manufacturing population are drawn from descriptions of the manufacturing towns abroad.

1876 N. Amer. Rev. 123 112 This view led to positive evil in the observations of the late transit by mystifying the observers.

1914 E. R. Burroughs Tarzan of Apes xxiii. 314 D'Arnot was mystified. It seemed incredible that there lived upon earth a full grown man who had never spoken with a fellow man.

1937 R. K. Narayan Bachelor of Arts v. 85 Most of the poems mystified Chandran.

1992 D. G. Campbell Crystal Desert ii. 48 For more than a century zoologists have been mystified by the disjunct distribution of the marsupials.

1827 R. Southey Let. 12 Apr. in C. C. Southey Life & Corr. R. Southey (1850) V. 290 The metapoliticians have dealt with their branch of policy as the metaphysicians have with their branch of philosophy,—they have muddied and mystified it.

1828 C. Wordsworth King Charles I 20 Why bring this perplexity into one of the simplest things in the world, by the only means through which it could be mystified?

1850 Constit. Expounded i. 4 The political writers and demagogues..vie with each other to mistify the plain import of that instrument [sc. the Constitution].

1850 Constit. Expounded i. 26 Those who represent it as such do it with the intent of mystifying the subject so as to be able, under cover of their misrepresentations, to accomplish ulterior designs.

1874 C. H. Spurgeon Treasury of David IV. Ps. xcviii. 2 We abhor those who mystify it [sc. the gospel].

1981 Peace News 11 Dec. 17/1 I am critical of..the way that science and medicine are mystified.

1829 I. Taylor Nat. Hist. Enthusiasm ix. 237 The practice of mystifying the Scriptures must be named as an especial characteristic of monkish religion.

1838 P. P. Pratt Mormonism Unveiled (ed. 2) 8 I reject Swedenborg, because he mistifies the Scriptures, and does away the ordinances of the gospel.

1839 W. Irving Chron. Wolfert's Roost in Knickerbocker Apr. 318 In that remote region commonly called the fabulous age,..vulgar fact becomes mystified, and tinted up with delectable fiction.

1991 A. Borrowdale Distorted Images xii. 133 In practice, Catholic churches may mystify the sacraments out of the ordinary world, yet essentially they are about bodiliness.