Bumfuzzle means to confuse — to leave someone flustered, baffled and slightly cross. It sounds like it ought to be Victorian. On the evidence, it is American, and from the very start of the twentieth century.

We looked for it in the dictionaries that Victorian-slang lists usually rely on, reading the full texts rather than quotations of them: Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811), John Camden Hotten's Slang Dictionary (1874) and J. Redding Ware's Passing English of the Victorian Era (1909). It is in none of them.

Where it does appear is in Dialect Notes, the journal of the American Dialect Society, in 1905. Two word-lists printed in the same volume have it. Louise Pound's, from Nebraska, gives bumfoozle, bumfuzzle, v. Bewilder — I was bumfoozled. J. W. Carr's, from north-west Arkansas, gives bumfuzzle, v. To confuse, with the example He was just bumfuzzled in that exam. Today Wiktionary labels it chiefly South Midland and Southern US.

Its origin is less clear. Green's Dictionary of Slang files it as a variant of bamfoozle, a form of bamboozle on record from 1837, which would make it a cousin of being tricked. Wiktionary prefers a different story: fuzzled, meaning confused or tipsy, with a comic bum- stuck on the front. Both are plausible; neither is proven.

What is clear is that it is a good word. Confused is a state. Bumfuzzled is a performance — the frown, the shrug, the instructions turned upside down.