Confused is what you are when nothing adds up. You read the instructions twice and still cannot tell which cable goes where; you get off at a stop that looks like yours and is not; you stand in a room full of strangers wondering whose party this is.
The mistake to avoid is confused against confusing. The timetable is confusing; you are confused. Say "I am confusing" and you have told people something quite different about yourself. You get confused, you are confused ABOUT a rule and confused BY an explanation. Things can be confused as well as people: a confused account of the evening, a confused heap of cables behind the television. In hospitals, confused is the gentle word for a patient who is not thinking clearly.
1adjectiveconfusedUnable to understand what is happening or what to do.
“She looked confused when he suddenly switched to Spanish.”
synonyms: puzzled, baffled, bewildered
2adjectivemuddledMuddled and hard to follow, of an account, an idea or an arrangement.
“He gave a confused account of where he had been all evening.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Also accepted in games: puzzled
Confused reached English twice over. The Middle English word confused meant "frustrated, ruined", built on Anglo-Norman confus, which came from Latin cōnfūsus, the past participle of cōnfundō. Modern English then rebuilt the same word from its own parts, confuse plus -ed, and the older sense fell away.
Anglo-Norman
confus
Middle English
confused — frustrated, ruined
English, today
confused
Originally from Middle English confused (“frustrated, ruined”), from Anglo-Norman confus + Middle English -ed, from Latin cōnfūsus, past participle of cōnfundō; now equivalent to confuse (a) ed.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA