Confident means sure of yourself and your abilities. A confident speaker, confident about the result, quietly confident.
The construction is confident about, confident of, or confident that. Quietly confident is a very British formula meaning fairly sure and unwilling to say so loudly. Note the spelling pair: confident with an e is the adjective, and confidant with an a is a person you confide in. Confidence is the noun, and it has a second sense of secrecy — in confidence, a confidence trick, which is a fraud built on winning trust.
1adjectiveconfidentSure of yourself and your abilities.
“She is confident in front of a room and hopeless on the phone.”
synonyms: self-assured, assured
2adjectivecertainCertain that something will happen.
“They were confident of finishing by March.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
confident is a state of assurance.
Latin confidens comes from confidere, to trust fully — con-, thoroughly, plus fidere, to trust. Fidelity, faith and confide are the same root, so being confident is a form of trusting.
Proto-Indo-European
*bʰeydʰ-
Latin
confidens — confident, i.e. self-confident, in a good or bad sense, bold, daring, audacious, impudent
Middle French
confident
English, today
confident
Built from
From Middle French confident, from Latin confidens (“confident, i.e. self-confident, in a good or bad sense, bold, daring, audacious, impudent”), present participle of confidere (“to trust fully, confide”). See confide.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA