Confidential

How to spell confidential

12 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce confidential

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does confidential mean?

1. adjectiveIntended to be kept secret or private, shared only with trusted people.

Confidential in a sentence

• The report contains confidential salary figures that staff must not share.

• Medical records are strictly confidential and cannot be released without consent.

Where does confidential come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb confidere, meaning 'to trust fully' or 'to have firm faith', built from the intensive prefix con- and fidere, 'to trust'. By the 1600s English had the noun 'confidence' for a feeling of trust or a private communication shared in trust, and 'confidential' grew from that to describe something spoken or written in trust and meant to be kept private. The same fid root for 'trust' runs through a whole family of English words, including 'fidelity', 'fiduciary', and even the dog name Fido, which literally promises faithfulness. The spelling trap lives in the middle and the end: the unstressed 'fid' is easy to mishear, and the ending is '-ential' rather than the look-alike '-encial', so writers who lean on sound alone can slip. Remembering the hidden word 'confide', meaning to trust someone with a secret, keeps the 'fid' spelling honest.

How the word is built

• con- (with, together)
• fid (trust, from Latin fidere)
• -ent (adjective)
• -ial (relating to)