Guilty

How to spell guilty

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce guilty

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does guilty mean?

1. adjectiveResponsible for a wrong, crime, or fault, or feeling shame about it.

Guilty in a sentence

• The jury found the defendant guilty on every count.

• He felt guilty about forgetting his sister's birthday.

Where does guilty come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English noun gylt, which meant a crime, a sin, or a failure to do what one owed, and from the related adjective gyltig, meaning deserving of blame. Its roots are firmly Germanic, though the precise older sources outside English are surprisingly murky, so scholars cannot fully trace where gylt itself came from. Over the medieval period the spelling picked up its tell-tale silent 'u' after the 'g', a habit borrowed from French scribal practice that kept the 'g' sounding hard rather than soft, the same trick that gives us 'guest', 'guard', and 'guide'. From the original sense of having committed an offence, the meaning broadened to cover the legal verdict of a court and, later still, the uneasy private feeling of having done wrong. That little 'ui' cluster is the main spelling trap, since the 'u' is never pronounced.

How the word is built

• guilt (offence, blame)
• -y (adjective suffix: characterised by)