confidant

[kon-fi-dant, -dahnt, -duhnt, kon-fi-dant, -dahnt]

noun

1. a close friend or associate to whom secrets are confided or with whom private matters and problems are discussed.

confidant

/ ˌkɒnfɪˈdænt, ˈkɒnfɪˌdænt /

noun

1. a person, esp a man, to whom private matters are confided

Word History and Origins

Origin of confidant¹

1705–15; < French confident < Italian confidente, noun use of adj.; confident

Word History and Origins

Origin of confidant¹

C17: from French confident, from Italian confidente , n use of adj: trustworthy, from Latin confīdens _confident

Example Sentences

Summers' interactions with his former confidant came back to haunt him last week, leading him to announce he was stepping back from public commitments and stopping teaching at Harvard.

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The conversations evolved with the chatbot mimicking a confidant and giving emotional support, according to the Social Media Victims Law Center and the Tech Justice Law Project, which filed the suits.

Read more on Los Angeles Times

The boy later took his father's name and became a respected attorney himself, as well as a close confidant of rising politician Marcos, who would win the presidency in 1965.

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The goal was a book about the great mundane, the stuff of life as experienced by her talented confidants.

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The love for Jordan, and what she believed in, is not only on display in this conversation, but also throughout the book itself — through friends, confidants and admirers of her work.

Read more on Salon

Related Words

• acquaintance 
• adviser 
• companion 
• crony 

When To Use

What’s the difference between confidant, confidante, and confident?

Confidant is a noun meaning someone you feel comfortable telling secret or private things to—a person you confide in. The word confidante is a gender-specific form of confidant that’s applied to women. Confident is an adjective that means sure of oneself or one’s abilities, or having a high level of certainty about something.Very rarely, the word confident can be used as a noun meaning the same thing as confidant, but we’re pretty confident almost no one uses it this way. We’re also sorry to report that there’s a kind of sofa called a confidente that can also be called a confidante, but honestly you’ll be better off if you just forget we ever said anything about it.Confidant and confidante are borrowed from French, which has grammatical gender, so some words end differently depending on whether they are applied to men or women (with e being the feminine ending). This happens in a few other pairs of words in English, like blond and blonde, though in many cases the term without the e has become largely gender-neutral. This is the case with confidant, which is the more commonly used of the two.What’s the best way to be confident that you’re using the right word? Just remember that the ending of both confidant and confidante sounds like the more formal pronunciation of aunt—your aunt could be your confidant (as could your commandant, the ending of which also sounds the same).The ending of confident, on the other hand, sounds like dent.Here’s an example of confidant and confident used correctly in the same sentence. (The word confidant could be replaced with confidante if you were referring to a woman and wanted to make the term gender-specific.)Example: I am confident that what I confide to my confidant stays confidential. Want to learn more? Read the full breakdown of the difference between confidant, confidante, and confident.