Word.ws English Dictionary

confessional

/kənˈfɛʃənəl/

More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations

Australia/kənˈfeʃənəl/

confessional adjective: in the manner or style of a confession.

confessional: in the manner or style of a confession
Image: Didier Descouens, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Adjective

confessional (comparative more confessional, superlative most confessional)

  1. In the manner or style of a confession.
    • The studied reticence of the poems in quatrains is opposed to the more confessional aspects of the monologue.1991, Manju Jain, A critical reading of the selected poems of T.S. Eliot, page 77
  2. Officially practicing a particular shared religion, as a state or organization; see confessionalism (sense 1).
    • confessional community

Noun

confessional (plural confessionals)

  1. A small room where confession—the Sacrament of Penance—is performed in private with a priest.
    • The confessional's chief amusement has been seduction–in all the ages of the Church.c. 1909, Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth, Letter XI
    • In one of the aisles there was an elaborately carved confessional box and I recognised the village priest in his heavy mountain boots and black cassock as he entered it and drew the dark velvet curtains behind him.1956, Delano Ames, chapter 13, in Crime out of Mind
  2. A confession.
    • When a 35-year-old Bill Clinton, famously the nation’s youngest former governor, set out in 1982 to reclaim the job he had lost two years earlier, he began with a remarkable televised confessional.
      “My daddy never had to whip me twice for the same thing,” Mr. Clinton told Arkansans in a campaign...2015 April 15, Jonathan Martin, “For a Clinton, It’s Not Hard to Be Humble in an Effort to Regain Power”, in The New York Times
  3. (reality television) A filmed interview in which a cast member speaks directly into the camera commenting on the events of the episode.
    • These characters behave as crassly as they do in large part because producers of shows such as The Bachelor deprive them of all contact with the outside world ([…]) and ply them with alcohol, then goad them to unleash their petty grievances in filmed "confessionals".2004, Ms. Magazine, volume 14
    • We see Brooks seethe in a corner, and, in a cut to a confessional, he exaggerates the scene, saying, “I’m feeling really uncomfortable. Her vagina’s in my face.”2021, Doreen St. Félix, “"The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City" Is Culturally Sensitive Trash”, in The New Yorker

confessional meaning in Bengali and Tagalog

confessional in Bengali

স্বীকারোক্তিমূলক

confessional in Tagalog

small room where confession is performed
kumpisalan

Examples of confessional in a sentence

  • The Apostles, Nicene Creed and the confessional books of Protestantism, such as the Augsburg Confession of Lutheranism are considered symbols.
  • Confessionality is the foundation for the Lutheran concept of confessional fellowship (Bekenntnisgemeinschaft).
  • Programmers call the computer equivalent "confessional debugging." "Hey, Eric, can you look at this code?

All 24 example sentences with confessional

Synonyms of confessional

Forms of confessional

Adjective
comparativemore confessional
superlativemost confessional
Noun
pluralconfessionals

Origin of confessional

From confession + -al.

From French confessionnal.

Words formed from confessional

Phrases with confessional

Questions about confessional

What does confessional mean?
Confessional means in the manner or style of a confession.
What is confessional in Bengali?
Confessional in Bengali is স্বীকারোক্তিমূলক. See Confessional meaning in Bengali.
What part of speech is confessional?
Confessional can be an adjective or a noun.
How do you pronounce confessional?
Confessional is pronounced /kənˈfɛʃənəl/ (UK).

Words near confessional in the dictionary

  1. confession
  2. confession booth
  3. confession booths
  4. confession box
  5. confession boxes
  6. confessional
  7. confessional chair
  8. confessional chairs
  9. confessional debugging
  10. confessional state
  11. confessionalise

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: confessional (page history and authors); confessional (Bengali, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-confessional.wav.

Cite this entry: “confessional.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/confessional. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.