1 [C,usually sing,U] ~ (for sth) (especially in particular religions) an act that you give yourself to do, or that a priest gives you to do in order to show that you are sorry for sth you have done wrong:
an act of penance * to do penance for your sins
2 [sing.] something that you have to do even though you do not like doing it:
She regards living in New York as a penance; she hates big cities.
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for penance is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is penance a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, penance is tagged as noun.
Does penance appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — penance appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.
