confession

Etymology

From Middle English confessioun, from Old French confession, from Latin cōnfessiō, cōnfessiōnem (“confession, acknowledgment, creed or avowal of one's faith”). Displaced native Old English andetnes. Doublet of confessio. Morphologically confess + -ion.

noun

1. The open admittance of having done something (especially something bad).
   Without the real murderer's confession, an innocent person will go to jail.
2. A formal document providing such an admission.
   He forced me to sign a confession!
   Both the basic idea of confession, and the techniques devised by Yezhov for extracting them, however, were to receive significant employment in Asia in the 1950s. The Chinese accused the Americans of waging bacteriological warfare in Korea. The evidence they produced consisted of feathers, insects, clams, rats, and other things riddled with germs and allegedly dropped from American planes. Such evidence was not, on the face of it, very convincing - though even this was accepted by one type of Westerner. To fortify their case, the Chinese resorted to confessions, extracted from American pilots. 1968, Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties, Macmillan Company, →LCCN, →OCLC, →OL, page 493
3. (Christianity) The disclosure of one's sins to a priest for absolution. In the Roman Catholic Church, it is now also termed the sacrament of reconciliation.
   I went to confession and now I feel much better about what I had done.
4. Acknowledgment of belief; profession of one's faith.
5. A formula in which the articles of faith are comprised; a creed to be assented to or signed, as a preliminary to admission to membership of a church; a confession of faith.