inficiate

Borrowed from Italian inficiare + English -ate (suffix forming verbs), from Medieval Latin īnficior, alteration of Classical Latin īnfitior (“to deny, contradict”), from *īnfitiae (“denial”) (see īnfitiās eō), from fateor (“to admit, acknowledge”). Presumably originally a mistranslation by Italian speakers; compare aprimorate (“to elevate, improve”), taken from Portuguese in a similar manner.

Earlier mentions of the word in Randle Cotgrave and Henry Cockeram's Early Modern English dictionaries^[1] are likely unconnected to the modern borrowing from Italian.

• (Received Pronunciation, General American) enPR: ĭnfĭsh′iāt′, IPA^(key): /ɪnˈfɪʃiˌeɪt/
• Hyphenation: in‧fi‧ci‧ate

inficiate (third-person singular simple present inficiates, present participle inficiating, simple past and past participle inficiated)

1. (transitive, especially non-native speakers' English) To render or demonstrate to be invalid; to invalidate or disprove.

   Synonyms: invalidate, disprove

   • 1930, G[iuseppe] Tucci, “The Beginning of Buddhist Logic”, in On Some Aspects of the Doctrines of Māitreya [Nātha] and Asanga, Calcutta: Calcutta University Press, page 69:

     This logical contradiction which therefore inficiates the validity of a notion can have two aspects: either the notion reached by our argument is uncertain, thak is it is not the only one which may be derived as a conclusion from our syllogism and then we have the aniścita or it is a petitio principi^[sic], the sādhyasama.

   • 1958 April, Nicolaus Toner, “The doctrine of justification according to Augustine of Rome (Favaroni) (✝ 1443)”, in Augustiniana‎^[1], volume 8, number 1/2, Augustinian Historical Institute, page 187:

     In connection with this last point it would be of interest to see if Favaroni inficiates the necessity of the sacrament of penance, and in this would be a forerunner of the lutherans^[sic].

   • 2012 June 1, Darja Kanduc, “Peptide cross-reactivity: the original sin of vaccines”, in Frontiers in Bioscience: Scholar Edition‎^[2], volume 4, number 4, IMR Press, →DOI, →PMID, page 1395:

     The massive usage of the same peptide blocks in microbial and human proteomes inficiates any causal relationship(s) between sharing of microbial amino acid motifs/structures and autoimmune reactions in humans.

• The term is primarily used by Italian speakers.

inficiate

1. inflection of inficiare:
   1. second-person plural present indicative/subjunctive
   2. second-person plural imperative

inficiate f pl

1. feminine plural of inficiato