Confidant

 WORD OF THE DA Y

confidant / noun / KAHN-fuh-dahnt

Definition
1: one to whom secrets are entrusted
2: intimate

Examples
“Lee Strasberg, the Actors Studio director who was, with his wife, Paula, a confidant and caretaker of Marilyn Monroe, felt that an actor must plumb the depths of her psyche to find the emotional truth of a performance.”
–James Sullivan, The Boston Globe, 20 Jan. 2022

Isidore Dockweiler was a Los Angeles native, born in 1867 at First and Broadway in downtown L.A., a leading lawyer and Democratic politician and confidant of President Woodrow Wilson.
— Los Angeles Times, 17 May 2022

Did You Know?
If you're confident of the trustworthiness of your confidants, you're tuned into the origins of the word confidant.
The word comes, via French, from the Italian confidente, meaning "trusting, having trust in," from Latin confīdere, meaning "to put one’s trust in, have confidence in.”
Other descendants of confīdere in English include confide, confidence, confident, and confidential, all of which ultimately have Latin fīdere, meaning "to trust (in), rely (on)," as their root.
Confidant (and its variant confidante, used especially of a woman) and confident are often confused, a topic about which we have plenty to say.