/ˈkɒnfɪdəns/
[noun] A strong feeling of trust in yourself or in someone or something else. It can also mean a secret that one person shares with another.
Confidence literally means 'with full faith' — so every self-help book is secretly a theology lesson.
The story of 'confidence' begins in ancient Rome, with the Latin verb 'fidere', meaning 'to trust' or 'to believe in'. This verb was itself rooted in the Proto-Indo-European word 'bheidh', a root concerned with persuasion, trust, and binding agreements — the same ancient impulse that led humans to shake hands and make oaths. From 'fidere', Latin speakers built the noun 'fides', meaning 'faith' or 'trust', a word so important to Roman society that it was personified as a goddess, Fides, who represented good faith in contracts and relationships.
Latin then combined 'fides' with the prefix 'com-', meaning 'together' or 'with', to create the verb 'confidere' — literally 'to trust fully' or 'to have complete faith in'. From this came the noun 'confidentia', meaning a state of firm trust or bold assurance. It is worth noting that the Romans used 'confidentia' with a slightly negative flavour at times — a person who was 'confidens' could be seen as arrogantly overconfident, even shameless in their boldness. Trust, it seems, has always walked a fine line between virtue and excess.
The word passed through Old French as 'confidence' — French being the great conduit between Latin and Middle English — and arrived in English during the 15th century. Early English uses closely followed the Latin meaning: confidence referred primarily to trust placed in another person, or the quality of being trustworthy. A 'confidence' was also something told in secret, shared between people who trusted each other completely — which is exactly how we still use phrases like 'taking someone into your confidence' today.
Over the following two centuries, the word's centre of gravity shifted. By the 17th century, 'confidence' increasingly described an internal state — the belief a person has in their own abilities. This shift from outward trust (faith in others) to inward trust (faith in oneself) reflects a broader cultural turn toward individual identity that marked the Renaissance and early modern period. The Shakespearean era was fascinated by the inner life, and the language adapted accordingly.
The darker shadow of the word appeared in the 19th century with the invention of the 'confidence man' — a trickster who wins a victim's trust only to betray it. The term was popularised in American newspapers in 1849, following the arrest of a swindler named William Thompson in New York. Herman Melville even used the archetype for his 1857 novel 'The Confidence-Man'. This criminal usage is a perfect echo of the Roman worry about 'confidentia' — that too much faith, given too easily, becomes its own kind of folly. The word still carries both possibilities: the quiet strength of genuine self-belief, and the dangerous warmth of misplaced trust.