confessor

• confessour (obsolete)

From Middle English confessor, confessour, from Anglo-Norman confessour, and its source, Latin cōnfessor, from cōnfiteor (“confess, admit, acknowledge”).

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /kənˈfɛsə/, /ˈkɒnfɛs(ɔ)ə/, /ˈkɒnfɛsɔː/
• (General American) IPA^(key): /kənˈfɛsɚ/
• Rhymes: -ɛsə(ɹ)

confessor (plural confessors, feminine confessoress)

1. One who confesses faith in Christianity in the face of persecution, but who is not martyred.
   • 2009, Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity, Penguin, published 2010, page 174:

     Confessors provided the troubled Church with an alternative sort of authority based on their sufferings, particularly when arguments began about how and how much to forgive those Christians who had given way to imperial orders – the so-called ‘lapsed’.

2. One who confesses to having done something wrong.
3. (Roman Catholicism) A priest who hears confession and then gives absolution

Beccari, C. (1908) The Catholic Encyclopedia‎, New York: Robert Appleton Company, retrieved May 24, 2009, Confessor

• (Classical) IPA^(key): /konˈfes.sor/, [kõːˈfɛs̠ːɔr]
• (Ecclesiastical) IPA^(key): /konˈfes.sor/, [koɱˈfɛsːor]

cōnfessor m (genitive cōnfessōris); third declension

1. confessor of the Christian faith
2. martyr

Third-declension noun.

• Catalan: confessor
• English: confessor
• French: confesseur
• Italian: confessore
• Portuguese: confessor
• Spanish: confesor

• “confessor”, in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (1879) A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
• confessor in Charles du Fresne du Cange’s Glossarium Mediæ et Infimæ Latinitatis (augmented edition with additions by D. P. Carpenterius, Adelungius and others, edited by Léopold Favre, 1883–1887)

Borrowed from Latin confessōrem.

confessor m (plural confessores, feminine confessora, feminine plural confessoras)

1. (religion) confessor (one who confesses faith in a religion, especially Christianity)
2. (Roman Catholicism) confessor (priest who hears confession)

confessor m (plural confessores)

1. Obsolete spelling of confesor