Confounded means confused or bewildered, especially when something unexpected or puzzling has thrown off your thinking. When you're confounded by a riddle, you can't figure out the answer no matter how hard you try. When a detective is confounded by mysterious clues that don't fit together, the case has stumped even their best reasoning.

The word carries a sense of frustration mixed with confusion. You might feel confounded when your science experiment produces completely different results than you predicted, or when your normally friendly dog suddenly refuses to come when called. Something has disrupted your expectations or understanding.

People also use confounded as a mild exclamation of annoyance, like “that confounded alarm clock woke me up again!” In older books, you'll often see characters mutter about “confounded nonsense” when something irritates them.

The confusion that comes with being confounded usually involves something that should make sense but somehow doesn't. A simple math problem that keeps giving you the wrong answer might leave you confounded until you discover you've been subtracting instead of multiplying. Once you find the missing piece or the reason behind the confusion, that confounded feeling disappears.