Belief

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /bɪˈliːf/

Definitions

1. a conviction or acceptance that something is true or exists, often without absolute proof
2. A personal conviction or trust in the truth or existence of something, typically lacking definitive evidence
3. An assurance or persuasion that something is true or valid, which may not be thoroughly substantiated by proof

Etymology: The most surprising thing about "belief" is that its spelling was not always a sign of its pronunciation. Its ancestor in Old English was "lēafa," meaning something close to "leave" in the sense of approval or permission, and Middle English kept that link in the form "bileve." The final sound was once a "v," just like in the verb "believe," and the noun only came to end in "f" later. Linguists explain the change by analogy: English already had pairs such as "grief" and "grieve" or "proof" and "prove," where the noun ends in "f" and the verb in "v," so "belief" was reshaped to match its partner. The older root reaches back to Proto-Germanic "laubō," which also gave German "Glaube," meaning "faith" or "belief." That shared ancestry shows the word was never first about knowledge or evidence. It was about trust in what someone else had said or promised, and the modern sense of accepting something without proof grew out of that older idea of confidence in a claim.

Synonyms: conviction, faith, trust, confidence, opinion

Antonyms: disbelief, skepticism, doubt, mistrust, uncertainty