Other forms: counseling, counselling, counsels, counseled, counselled
To counsel is to give careful guidance, especially to somebody in trouble. Counsel patience, counsel the bereaved, counsel against it.
It is formal and weightier than advise. The noun means advice — take counsel, wise counsel — and, in law, a barrister or the legal team: counsel for the defence, Queen's Counsel. Counselling is the professional talking therapy, and a counsellor gives it. Note the spelling trap: council is a body of people and counsel is advice, and councillor and counsellor are two different jobs. Keep your own counsel means to say nothing about your plans.
1verbcounselTo give careful guidance, especially in difficulty.
“She counselled him against saying anything at all.”
2nounadviceAdvice.
“His counsel was worth more than anybody else's.”
3nounlawyerA lawyer or legal team in a case.
“Counsel for the defence objected four times.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
counsel is guidance.
Latin consilium meant deliberation or a plan, from consulere, to consult. Council comes from a different Latin word, concilium, an assembly — they are unrelated and have been confusing English spellers for six hundred years.
Proto-Indo-European
*selh₁-
Latin
cōnsilium
Old French
conseil
Middle English
counseil
English, today
counsel
From Middle English counseil, conseil, from Old French conseil, from Latin cōnsilium, of unknown origin but possibly from either com- + calō (via a phonetic variant of concilium) or cōnsulō.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA