I’ve never given a speech at a graduation but if I did I’d talk about paradox, a governing feature of life whose power sometimes takes years to fully appreciate. Want to learn more? Read the full breakdown of the difference between confident, confidant, and confidante.It’s graduation season, with many young people leaving the friendly confines of university life to enter the mysterious world of work. (The word confidant could be replaced with confidante if you were referring to a woman and wanted to make the term gender-specific.)Įxample: I am confident that what I confide to my confidant stays confidential. Here’s an example of confident and confidant used correctly in the same sentence. The ending of confident, on the other hand, sounds like dent. 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). This is the case with confidant, which is the more commonly used of the two. 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. 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.Ĭonfidant 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). 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. The word confidante is a gender-specific form of confidant that’s applied to women.
Confidant is a noun meaning someone you feel comfortable telling secret or private things to-a person you confide in. Confident is an adjective that means sure of oneself or one’s abilities, or having a high level of certainty about something.
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