Debunk

WORD OF THE DAY

debunk / verb / dee-BUNK

Definition
: to expose the sham or falseness of

Examples
"The idea that dogs spend every waking moment trying to usurp their human masters and become 'the alpha' in the house ... [was] first introduced by a wolf ecologist in the mid-20th Century, [and] was later debunked after ecologists realised that the original observations of dominance behaviours were based on captive wolves (unrelated to one another) kept in a zoo enclosure."
— Jules Howard, Science Focus, 19 May 2022

The group attempts to debunk the notion that being in the office together allows for serendipitous moments of collaboration and creation.
— Samuel Axon, Ars Technica, 9 May 2022

Did You Know?
If you guessed that debunk has something to do with bunk, meaning "nonsense," you're correct. We started using bunk around the turn of the 20th century. (It derived, via bunkum, from a remark made by a congressman from Buncombe County, North Carolina.)
Within a couple of decades, debunk was first used in print for the act of taking the bunk out of something.
There are plenty of synonyms for debunk, including disprove, rebut, refute, and the somewhat rarer confute.
Even falsify can mean "to prove something false," in addition to "to make something false."
Debunk itself often suggests that something is not merely untrue but also a sham; one can simply disprove a myth, but if it is debunked, the implication is that it was a grossly exaggerated or foolish claim.