confronté

Confronté is a French past participle and adjective derived from the verb confronter. It generally means “faced with” or “confronted,” and is used to describe a person or thing that has to deal with a situation, fact, or obstacle. In everyday French it often occurs in compound tenses with être, and can also function as an adjective that agrees in gender and number.

As a verb form, confronted describes states or conditions. Example: l’équipe est confrontée à des difficultés. Here the feminine singular équipe takes the form confrontée. Plural or masculine forms appear as confrontés or confrontés, respectively, depending on the subject. The expression is common with prepositions such as à: être confronté à des problèmes, être confrontée à une réalité.

Confronté is also used in noun-like or attributive senses to indicate someone who has been shown or forced to face a reality. A related construction is des difficultés auxquelles l’équipe est confrontée, meaning “the difficulties with which the team is faced.” The word appears frequently in journalism, academic writing, and legal language.

Confronter is the related verb meaning “to face someone with” or “to compare or oppose.” It can take the prepositions à or de in various senses, for example confronter des faits (to compare/contrast facts) or confronter quelqu’un à quelque chose (to confront someone with something). The noun form la confrontation denotes a face-to-face encounter or the act of confronting, as in la confrontation des témoins.

Etymology traces confronté to the Latin confrontare, from con- “together” and frontis/fons “face.” Related terms include confronter, confrontation, and confrontational styles of argument.