What does guilted mean?
Guilted is chiefly the past tense and past participle of the verb guilt. It can mean that someone has been found or declared guilty of an offence, as in a tribunal or court, although convicted is more usual in modern legal writing. It can also mean that a person has been made to feel guilty, often through emotional pressure or manipulation: a manipulative relative may guilt someone into lending money or accepting blame. In this second sense, guilted often carries a negative connotation and suggests an unfair or emotionally manipulative appeal. The word can also be used less commonly as an adjective meaning guilty, remorseful, or troubled by a guilty conscience, although contemporary speakers usually say that they feel guilty. Guilted is therefore a useful word for distinguishing between the guilt assigned by a judgment and the guilt deliberately produced in another person.
The past tense and past participle of guilt: to make someone feel guilty or to find someone guilty of an offence.
"The prosecutor argued that the evidence had guilted the defendant of fraud."
The legal sense sounds formal and comparatively old-fashioned beside convicted or found guilty. The emotional sense is common in informal and literary usage.
Feeling guilty or having a guilty conscience.
"The confession left her guilted and determined to make amends."
This use is much less common in contemporary English; feeling guilty is the usual expression.
Guilted can play two grammatical roles: as an inflected verb and, much less commonly, as an adjective for someone feeling remorse.
Reviewed by Deb Chak, Editor. AI-assisted content curated by RJS Tech Solutions LLP.
Where does guilted come from?
Guilted is not an independent lexical creation but the regular past-tense and past-participle form of guilt. The English family goes back to Old English gult, meaning fault or guilt, and gyltan, meaning to find guilty; the latter is the source of guilty. Related Germanic cognates survive in German Schuld and Dutch schuld, while guiltless and guiltiness belong to the same native English word family.
How guilted is actually used
As a verb, guilted is less common than convicted or found guilty in legal contexts. In the sense of causing guilt, it often appears in constructions such as guilt someone into doing something. As an adjective, it is much less common in contemporary English, and feeling guilty is normally preferred.
Easily confused with guilted
Guilted is usually an inflected form of the verb guilt, whereas guilty is the standard adjective for a person who feels remorse or has been found responsible for an offence.