disproof

nounC2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speech — proof sits at #989Too rare in one of the two pools to compare — fewer than 20 uses in speech or in writing

A disproof is reasoning that shows something is false. Offer a disproof, a clean disproof, no disproof exists.

It is easier than proof in most fields, since one counterexample is a disproof and no number of examples is a proof. That asymmetry is the whole basis of testing a scientific claim.

Definitions of disproof

1noundisproofReasoning that shows something is false.C2
“The discovery of a single black swan was a disproof of the claim that all swans are white.”

disproof is a reasoning.

Where it comes from

Dis-, undoing, plus proof, on the pattern of disprove.

Proto-Indo-European
*bʰuH-
Latin
proba — a proof
Old French
prove
Middle English
proof
English
proof
English, today
disproof

From dis + proof, after disprove. proof comes from Middle English proof, from Old French prove, from Latin proba (“a proof”), from Latin probō (“to prove”); see prove; compare also the doublet a doublet of probe.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Logic & Argument

Practise this word

disproof in the wild

One method of disproof is the use of Scherk surfaces, as used by Harold Rosenberg and Pascal Collin.
Schoen–Yau conjecture
With this institution, CESS aims to disproof the ideological and controversial Armenian theories about Turkey and Azerbaijan.
Center for Eurasian Strategic Studies
For all nodes proof and disproof numbers are stored, and updated during the search.
Proof-number search
To each node of the partially expanded game tree the proof number and disproof number are associated.
Proof-number search
On June 6, 2023, Robert Burklund, Jeremy Hahn, Ishan Levy, and Tomer Schlank announced a disproof of the telescope conjecture.
Ravenel's conjectures

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the prove family

proof

disproof — used too rare to measure · point at the bar for the others

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