Guilt is the heavy, sinking feeling that stays with you after doing something you know was wrong. The message from a friend you have left unanswered for three weeks; the last biscuit eaten standing at the cupboard.
The same word does cold legal work as well: a court decides guilt or innocence, and there guilt is a fact about what happened, not a feeling at all. The adjective is guilty — guilty of theft, a guilty conscience, a guilty pleasure. Guilt also works as a verb: you guilt someone into helping, and the pressure itself is a guilt trip. People say I feel guilty far more than I feel guilt, though both are correct. And guilt is not shame: guilt is about the thing you did, shame is about the person you fear you are.
1nounguiltThe unhappy feeling of having done something wrong.~35%
“The guilt kept him awake for weeks afterwards.”
synonyms: remorse
2nounfactThe fact of having committed a crime or done wrong.~63%
“The jury was not convinced of his guilt.”
3verbmakingTo make someone do something by making them feel bad about refusing (informal).~2%
“They guilted him into driving everyone home.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 17 sentences found in the wild and placed 17 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
guilt is a feeling.
Old English gylt meant guilt, sin, offence, crime — and where it came from nobody has settled. One line of thought links it to ġieldan, to pay, requite or punish, the ancestor of yield, and so to a Germanic family of words about debt. But the Old English stem and its -t ending do not fit those continental relatives, so guilt keeps its secret.
Old English
gylt — guilt, sin, offense, crime, fault
Middle English
gilt
English, today
guilt
Built from
From Middle English gilt, from Old English gylt (“guilt, sin, offense, crime, fault”). From Middle English gilt, gult, from Old English gylt (“guilt, sin, offense, crime, fault”), of obscure origin. Possibly related with ġieldan (“to pay, requite, punish”) (whence yield), from Proto-West Germanic guldijā (whence Middle High German gülte (“debt, fee, financial duty”), Middle Low German gülde, German Gülte), from Proto-West Germanic geldan (“to pay for”), from Proto-Germanic geldaną (“to pay”). However, neither the Old English stem form nor its ending -t (instead of -d) fit the continental form.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA