Meaning
A formal admission that something was one's own fault; an acknowledgment of personal error, often public and sometimes ritualised or half-ironic. Compared with a plain apology or the slangier 'my bad', it carries confessional gravity. In English it names the admission itself ('he issued a mea culpa') and also serves as an interjection owning a mistake on the spot. Formal and often journalistic; can sound sincere or theatrically self-flagellating depending on context. Regional use: General English (borrowed from Latin).
Origin
Latin for '(through) my fault', taken from the Confiteor, the confession prayer of the Roman Mass, in which the penitent strikes the breast and says 'mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa' - 'through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault'. The Latin formula appears embedded in English religious contexts as far back as Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1374, per The Phrase Finder), but the Oxford English Dictionary dates its first attestation as a freestanding English apology expression to 1533, as reported in a peer-reviewed study of politeness in the history of English.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- mea culpas
- mea maxima culpa
Usage Examples
- The minister's mea culpa over the scheduling scandal stopped short of a resignation.
- In her memoir she offers a long mea culpa for the errors in her early research.
- 'Mea culpa - I sent the file to the wrong address,' he told the client.