guilt
Formsguilts, guilting, guilted
- 1A painful feeling of regret that comes from knowing you have done something wrong.
A deep sense of guilt kept her awake long after the argument ended.
He carried the guilt of his harsh words for years afterward.
Similarremorse
Note
Here guilt moves inside the person, and it is usually spoken of as a sense of guilt that someone carries. Timothy R. Jennings's The Aging Brain (2018) separates two kinds. Appropriate guilt follows a real wrong, such as betraying a trust. Inappropriate guilt grows from believing a lie. Remorse is the close synonym, but guilt, unlike remorse, can be felt where no wrong was actually done.
- 2The fact of being responsible for having done something wrong.
Her guilt in the affair was obvious to everyone present.
The committee debated where the guilt for the failure truly lay.
Similarculpability, responsibility, blame, fault
Oppositeinnocence
Note
The core noun, and the one with the deepest roots. Old English gylt covered guilt, sin, offense, crime and fault at once. Its origin is obscure, but it may be related to ġieldan, "to pay, requite, punish," the verb behind yield, which suggests guilt as something owed. It names a fact about what someone did, not a feeling, so guilt is said to lie somewhere. Its opposite is innocence.
- 3The state of having been found guilty, or of having admitted to a crime, in a court of law.
The prosecution failed to prove the defendant's guilt beyond reasonable doubt.
His guilt was established only after the appeal was rejected.
Similarculpability
Oppositeinnocence
Note
The courtroom's version of the word: guilt settled by a verdict or a plea rather than merely believed. Lawyers prove, establish or admit it. Keep it apart from the moral sense, because a person can bear responsibility without guilt ever being proved in court. A legal finding also says nothing about the feeling of remorse.
- 4To make someone feel guilty, especially as a way to influence what they do.
He guilted his roommate into covering the rent again.
They guilt their employees into working weekends without extra pay.
Note
A pressure verb of informal speech, made directly from the noun. Its natural construction is guilt someone into something: "guilted into giving up something," as Nora Roberts writes in True Betrayals (1995). It keeps company with other verbs of coercion, and Melody Beattie's Codependent No More (1992) lists it beside manipulated, coerced and forced. In formal prose, made to feel guilty is the safer choice.
Less common meanings
- 5To commit offenses; to act in a criminal manner.
Note
A verb Old English already had: gyltan, "to commit sin, be guilty," built on the same noun gylt that lies behind responsibility for wrongdoing. It took no object; one simply guilted, as one sinned. It is now obsolete. A modern reader who meets guilted will hear the informal "make feel guilty" verb, which was formed afresh from the noun and did not descend from this one.
- 6Obsolete form of gilt.
Note
A spelling, not a sense of the moral word: here guilt means gilded, as an obsolete form of gilt. A 1696 list of silver printed in The Connoisseur counts "two guilt bolls" and "24 pieces guilt and unguilt." The adjective is not comparable. Today only gilt is correct, so a "guilt mirror" reads as a misspelling or an accidental pun.
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Practice
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Origins
From Middle English 'gilt', from Old English 'gylt' ("guilt, sin, offense, crime, fault"), of obscure origin. It may be related to Old English 'ġieldan' ("to pay, requite, punish"), the source of 'yield', and possibly connected to Proto-West Germanic '*guldijā' (source of words meaning "debt, fee"), though the forms do not fully fit.
From Middle English 'gilten', from Old English 'gyltan' ("to commit sin, be guilty"), from 'gylt' ("guilt, sin, offense, crime, fault").