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guilt Definition

guilt (gilt)

noun

  1. the state of having done a wrong or committed an offense; culpability, legal or ethical
  2. a painful feeling of self-reproach resulting from a belief that one has done something wrong or immoral
  3. conduct that involves guilt; crime; sin

Etymology: ME gilt < OE gylt, a sin, offense

guilt Synonyms

guilt

n.

culpability, blame, error, fault, lapse, slip, crime, sin, offense, answerability, liability, misstep, solecism, criminality, blameworthiness, sinfulness, misconduct, dereliction, misbehavior, malpractice, peccability, frailty, delinquency, transgression, dereliction, indiscretion, weakness, failing, malefaction, malfeasance, felonious conduct.

Antonyms innocence*, freedom from fault, blamelessness.

guilt Usage Examples

Converse of object

  • assuage: People often try to assuage the guilt of wrongdoing by doing right.
  • admit: Both admitted guilt fleeting popularity of much bigger position.
  • incur: When we fail to use our God-given gifts and circumstances well, we incur guilt.
  • feel: Does the industry feel guilt about selling harmful products?
  • relieve: I don't want to have his child just to relieve the guilt Trying to connect Three years ago, my mother died suddenly.
  • inherit: Freud thought that all humanity had inherited this guilt from the primal crime, so even now we have mixed feelings about God.

Converse of subject

  • wrack: Wracked by guilt, Billie is now locked into a triangle - a kind of emotional Bermuda triangle of lost souls.
  • haunt: In Act Two, Meier enacted the living nightmare of Sieglinde - she is haunted by guilt and terror - with terrific intensity.
  • consume: He does, but consumed by guilt, he turns himself in to the Egyptian priests.

Adjective modifier

  • middle-class: His working-class angst has been replaced with middle-class guilt.
  • collective: It provides a powerful challenge to the notion of German collective guilt.
  • Catholic: One of the great British films of the 1940s it is brimming over with Catholic guilt.
  • overwhelming: At times his friends experience overwhelming guilt, over-protectiveness toward Matt, and fears of incompetence in the event of seizures.

Modifies a noun

  • trip: We all have a bit of a guilt trip in the " getaway vehicle " .
  • feeling: Either of these controls is more effective than any appeal to guilt feelings.

Noun used with modifier

  • survivor: It confronts serious issue of AIDS such as safer sex, combination therapies, survivor guilt and returning to work.

Possessives

  • defendant: Those facts certainly do not constitute logical proof of the defendant's guilt, which is the standard Popper sets for inductive inference.
  • survivor: He suffers from nightmares, panic attacks and survivor's guilt.

Preposition: of

  • sin: How can I be saved from the guilt of sin?

Preposition: by

  • association: They felt they could be labeled with " guilt by association.
guilt Quotes

Kingly conclaves stern and cold, Where blood with guilt is bought and sold.

—Shelley, Percy Bysshe

I always take blushing either for a sign of guilt, or of ill breeding.

—Congreve,William

If something makes you cry, you have to do something about it.That'sthe difference betweenpolitics and guilt.

—Clinton, Bill (William)

The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless, Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king Over himself; just, gentle, wise: but man Passionless?öno, yet free from guilt or pain, Which were, for his will made or suffered them, Nor yet exempt, though ruling them like slaves, From chance, and death, and mutability, The clogs of that which else might oversoar The loftiest star of unascended heaven, Pinnacled dim in the intense inane.

—Shelley, Percy Bysshe

Rock of Ages, cleft for me, Let me hide myself inThee, Let the water and the blood, From thy riven side which flowed, Be of sin the double cure, Cleanse me from its guilt and power.

—Toplady, Augustus Montague

A pert, prim Prater of the northern race, Guilt in his heart, and famine in his face.

—Churchill, Charles

O Geordie, Jingling Geordie, it was grand to hear Baby Charles laying down the guilt of dissimulation and Steemie lecturing on the turpitude of incontinence.

—Scott, Sir Walter

To charge all unmerited praise with the guilt of flattery, and to suppose that the encomiast always knows and feels the falsehood of his assertions, issurely to discover great ignorance of human nature and human life. In determinations depending not on rules, but on experience and comparison, judgement is always to some degree subject to affection.Very near to admiration is the wish to admire.

—Johnson, Samuel known as Dr Johnson

Life without industry isguilt, and industry without art is brutality.

—Ruskin,John

Linked in love so dear, To undergo with me one guilt, one crime, If any be, of tasting this fair fruit.

—Milton,John

When a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it ishis chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip.

—Lessing, Doris May ne¤  e Tayler

The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime, and the punishment of his guilt.

—Curran,John Philpot

While I have a tongue I'll abuse you, you most inimitable periphery. Look at her, boys! there she standsöa convicted perpendicular in petticoats! There's contamination in her circumference, and she trembles with guilt down to the extremities of her corollaries. Ah! you're found out, you rectilineal antecedent, and equiangular old hag! 'Tis with you the devil will flyaway, you porter-swiping similitude of the bisection of a vortex!

—O'Connell, Daniel known as  the Liberator

I amsuspicious of guilt in myself and inother people: it is usuallyawayof notthinking, orofannouncingone's own fine sensibilities the better to be rid of them.

—Hellman, Lillian Florence

When lovely woman stoops to folly And finds too late that men betray, What charm can soothe her melancholy, What art can wash her guilt away?

—Goldsmith, Oliver