Verb

(baffl)

(obsolete) To publicly disgrace, especially of a recreant knight.

* 1596 , (Edmund Spenser), The Faerie Queene , VI.7:

He by the heeles him hung upon a tree, / And baffuld so, that all which passed by / The picture of his punishment might see […].

(obsolete) To hoodwink or deceive (someone).

(Barrow)

To bewilder completely; to confuse or perplex.

I am baffled by the contradictions and omissions in the instructions.

* Prescott

calculations so difficult as to have baffled , until within a recent period, the most enlightened nations

* John Locke

The mere intricacy of a question should not baffle us.

* Cowper

the art that baffles time's tyrannic claim

* South

a suitable scripture ready to repel and baffle them all

To struggle in vain.

A ship baffles with the winds.

Verb

(en-verb)

To renounce or dissolve all bonds of affiance, faith, or obligation with; to reject, refuse, or renounce.

* 1603-1625 , (Beaumont and Fletcher)

For thee I have defied my constant mistress.

To challenge (someone) to do something difficult.

* 1671 , (John Milton), (Samson Agonistes)

I once again / Defie thee to the trial of mortal fight.

* 1900 , Edith King Hall, Adventures in Toyland Chapter 6

*:"So you actually think yours is good-looking?" sneered the Baker. "Why, I could make a better-looking one out of a piece of dough."

*:"I defy you to," the Hansom-driver replied. "A face like mine is not easily copied. Nor am I the only person of that opinion. All the ladies think that I am beautiful. And of course I go by what they think."

To refuse to obey.

* 2005 , , Presidential Radio Address - 19 March 2005

*:Before coalition forces arrived, Iraq was ruled by a dictatorship that murdered its own citizens, threatened its neighbors, and defied the world.

*{{quote-magazine, date=2013-08-10, volume=408, issue=8848, magazine=(The Economist), author=Lexington

, title= Keeping the mighty honest , passage=British journalists shun complete respectability, feeling a duty to be ready to savage the mighty, or rummage through their bins. Elsewhere in Europe, government contracts and subsidies ensure that press barons will only defy the mighty so far.}}

To not conform to or follow a pattern or certain set of rules.

* 1955 , Anonymous, The Urantia Book Paper 41

*:By tossing this nineteenth electron back and forth between its own orbit and that of its lost companion more than twenty-five thousand times a second, a mutilated stone atom is able partially to defy gravity and thus successfully to ride the emerging streams of light and energy, the sunbeams, to liberty and adventure.

* 2013 , Jeré Longman in the New York Times, W.N.B.A. Hopes Griner Can Change Perceptions, as Well as Game Itself

*:“To be determined,” Kane said, “is whether Griner and her towering skill and engaging personality will defy the odds and attract corporate sponsors as part of widespread public acceptance four decades after passage of the gender-equity legislation known as Title IX.”