Avow vs Profess - What's the difference?
avow | profess |
To declare openly and boldly, as something believed to be right; to own, acknowledge or confess frankly.
* 1858 , Henry Stephens Randall, The Life of Thomas Jefferson (volume 1, page 461)
To bind or devote by a vow.
(legal) To acknowledge and justify, as an act done. See avowry.
(obsolete) avowal
To administer the vows of a religious order to (someone); to admit to a religious order. (Chiefly in passive.)
* 2000 , Butler's Lives of the Saints , p.118:
(reflexive) To declare oneself (to be something).
* 2011 , Alex Needham, The Guardian , 9 Dec.:
(ambitransitive) To declare; to assert, affirm.
* c. 1604 , (William Shakespeare), Measure for Measure , First Folio 1623:
* Milton
* 1974 , ‘The Kansas Kickbacks’, Time , 11 Feb 1974:
*{{quote-magazine, date=2013-06-07, author=(Gary Younge)
, volume=188, issue=26, page=18, magazine=(The Guardian Weekly)
, title= To make a claim (to be something), to lay claim to (a given quality, feeling etc.), often with connotations of insincerity.
* 2010 , Hélène Mulholland, The Guardian , 28 Sep 2010:
To declare one's adherence to (a religion, deity, principle etc.).
* 1983 , Alexander Mcleish, The Frontier Peoples of India , Mittal Publications 1984, p.122:
To work as a professor of; to teach.
*, II.12:
*:he was a Spaniard, who about two hundred yeeres since professed Physicke in Tholouse .
As verbs the difference between avow and profess
is that avow is to declare openly and boldly, as something believed to be right; to own, acknowledge or confess frankly while profess is to administer the vows of a religious order to (someone); to admit to a religious order (chiefly in passive).As a noun avow
is (obsolete) avowal.avow
English
Verb
(en verb)- in 1786, and for some period later, there were few, if any, prominent Americans, who avowed themselves in favor of broadly democratic systems.
- (Wyclif)
- (Blackstone)
Antonyms
* disavowNoun
- (Dryden)
External links
* * *profess
English
Verb
(es)- This swayed the balance decisively in Mary's favour, and she was professed on 8 September 1578.
- Kiefer professes himself amused by the fuss that ensued when he announced that he was buying the Mülheim-Kärlich reactor.
- He professes to haue receiued no sinister measure from his Iudge, but most willingly humbles himselfe to the determination of Iustice.
- The best and wisest of them all professed / To know this only, that he nothing knew.
- The Governor immediately professed that he knew nothing about the incident.
Hypocrisy lies at heart of Manning prosecution, passage=WikiLeaks did not cause these uprisings but it certainly informed them. The dispatches revealed details of corruption and kleptocracy that many Tunisians suspected,
- Ed Miliband professed ignorance of the comment when he was approached by the BBC later.
- The remainder of the population, about two-thirds, belongs to the Mongolian race and professes Buddhism.