Library / English Dictionary

PENANCE

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

 I. (noun) 

Sense 1

Meaning:

A Catholic sacrament; repentance and confession and atonement and absolution

Classified under:

Nouns denoting acts or actions

Hypernyms ("penance" is a kind of...):

sacrament (a formal religious ceremony conferring a specific grace on those who receive it; the two Protestant ceremonies are baptism and the Lord's Supper; in the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church there are seven traditional rites accepted as instituted by Jesus: baptism and confirmation and Holy Eucharist and penance and holy orders and matrimony and extreme unction)

Meronyms (parts of "penance"):

absolution; remission; remission of sin; remittal (the act of absolving or remitting; formal redemption as pronounced by a priest in the sacrament of penance)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "penance"):

confession ((Roman Catholic Church) the act of a penitent disclosing his sinfulness before a priest in the sacrament of penance in the hope of absolution)

Sense 2

Meaning:

Voluntary self-punishment in order to atone for some wrongdoing

Synonyms:

penance; self-abasement; self-mortification

Classified under:

Nouns denoting acts or actions

Hypernyms ("penance" is a kind of...):

penalisation; penalization; penalty; punishment (the act of punishing)

Sense 3

Meaning:

Remorse for your past conduct

Synonyms:

penance; penitence; repentance

Classified under:

Nouns denoting feelings and emotions

Hypernyms ("penance" is a kind of...):

compunction; remorse; self-reproach (a feeling of deep regret (usually for some misdeed))

Credits

 Context examples: 

Here, she must be leading a life of privation and penance; there it would have been all enjoyment.

(Emma, by Jane Austen)

The end of April was coming on; it would soon be almost three months, instead of two, that she had been absent from them all, and that her days had been passing in a state of penance, which she loved them too well to hope they would thoroughly understand; and who could yet say when there might be leisure to think of or fetch her?

(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)

Harriet seemed ready to worship her friend for a sentence so satisfactory; and Emma was only saved from raptures and fondness, which at that moment would have been dreadful penance, by the sound of her father's footsteps.

(Emma, by Jane Austen)

With the fortitude of a devoted novitiate, she had resolved at one-and-twenty to complete the sacrifice, and retire from all the pleasures of life, of rational intercourse, equal society, peace and hope, to penance and mortification for ever.

(Emma, by Jane Austen)

She was, in fact, beginning very much to wonder that she had ever thought him pleasing at all; and his sight was so inseparably connected with some very disagreeable feelings, that, except in a moral light, as a penance, a lesson, a source of profitable humiliation to her own mind, she would have been thankful to be assured of never seeing him again.

(Emma, by Jane Austen)