Word of the Day:
confess
What It Means
To admit to the truth, particularly in the context of sins or crimes committed.
To acknowledge faith in; to profess belief in.
To unburden (oneself) of sins to God or a priest, in order to receive absolution.
I confess to spray-painting all over that mural!
Confess in Context
“A jealous man confesses his wife under a priest's habit, who tells him that she is visited every night by a friar; […]”
Did You Know?
From Middle English confessen, from Anglo-Norman confesser, from Old French confesser, from Latin confessus (Old French confés), past participle of cōnfiteor (“to confess, admit”) from con- + fateor (“to admit”). Displaced Middle English andetten (“to confess, admit”) (from Old English andettan). Doublet of confiteor. Sense 6 is a semantic loan from Japanese 告(こく)白(はく) (kokuhaku).
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: confess (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “confess.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/confess. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.