Other forms: consciences
Your conscience is the inner sense that tells you when you have done wrong. A guilty conscience, a clear conscience, my conscience would not let me.
The fixed phrases carry most of the word's work: a clear conscience, a guilty conscience, on your conscience, in all conscience, and a matter of conscience. A conscientious objector is somebody who refuses military service on moral grounds, and a free vote in parliament is sometimes called a conscience vote. Note conscious, which means awake and aware and is a different word, and conscientious, which means careful and thorough.
1nounconscienceThe inner sense of right and wrong.
“His conscience kept him awake for about a week.”
conscience is an inner moral sense.
Latin conscientia means knowledge shared with oneself — con-, with, plus scire, to know. Science, conscious and conscience are the same root, and the Latin makes the idea exact: a conscience is the part of you that knows what you did.
Proto-Indo-European
*skey-
Latin
conscientia — knowledge within oneself
Old French
conscience
Middle English
conscience
English, today
conscience
Built from
From Middle English conscience, from Old French conscience, from Latin conscientia (“knowledge within oneself”) (a calque of σῠνείδησῐς), from consciens, present participle of conscire (“to know, to be conscious (of wrong)”), from com- (“together”) + scire (“to know”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA