The feeling of deserving blame for a specific act or omission.
The feeling of deserving blame for a specific act or omission — “I did something bad.”
The act-focused counterpart to shame: it attaches to a specific deed or norm-violation and is tied to conscience and the impulse to repair — hence its more prosocial character (apology, amends). It needs no audience (an internal self-appraisal), unlike embarrassment (social) or humiliation (externally inflicted). Remorse and contrition are allied but narrower — remorse is the anguish over a particular wrong, contrition the penitent wish to amend.
The painful sense of deserving blame for one's offenses — self-reproach.
This emotional sense is recorded from the 1680s and was once disputed by purists.
The fact of having committed an offense, especially a punishable one.
The older, objective sense — guilt as opposed to innocence (Old English gylt “offense”).
Old English gylt “crime, sin, failure of duty,” of unknown ultimate origin. The -u- in the modern spelling is unetymological.
A shift from the objective/legal sense (“crime, offense”) toward the subjective emotional sense (“the feeling of being to blame”), first recorded in the 1680s. The verb “to guilt (someone)” is recent (later 20th century). No reliable further recent shift.