Confessional

How to spell confessional

12 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce confessional

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does confessional mean?

1. nounAn enclosed booth in a church where a priest hears confessions privately.
2. adjectiveRelating to or marked by frank admission of private feelings or wrongdoing.

Confessional in a sentence

• noun

  The old church restored its carved wooden confessional last spring.

• adjective

  Her memoir takes a strikingly confessional tone about her years of debt.

• noun

  He knelt in the confessional and waited for the priest to speak.

• adjective

  The interview turned confessional when he admitted his early mistakes.

Where does confessional come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word traces back to the Latin verb confiteri, meaning 'to acknowledge fully' or 'to admit', which was formed from the prefix con- (here an intensifier, 'wholly') and fateri, 'to admit or own up to'. From this came the noun confessio, 'an acknowledgement or admission', a term that took on strong religious weight in the early Church as the formal admission of sins. Medieval Latin developed confessionalis to describe things relating to confession, and by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries English had borrowed 'confessional' to name the enclosed booth in which a priest hears a penitent's confession. The same fateri root quietly survives in 'profess' and 'confess' themselves, which is a useful reminder that the double 's' belongs to the 'fess' core. In the twentieth century the adjective broadened to describe frank, self-revealing writing, as in confessional poetry, while keeping the double-s spelling and the single 'f' that often trip people up.

How the word is built

• con- (intensive, fully)
• fess (from Latin fateri/confiteri: to acknowledge or admit)
• -ion (noun-forming)
• -al (relating to)