expiation

noun

ex·​pi·​a·​tion ˌek-spē-ˈā-shən 

1

a

: the act of expiating something : the act of extinguishing the guilt incurred by something

… the Mass, the principal church ceremony that celebrates the sacrifice of Christ for the expiation of the original sin of Adam and Eve.

—The Root (online)

b

: the act or process of making atonement for something

When the available files failed to provide a complete picture of Argentine complicity, what began as an attempt at public expiation and national exorcism of its Nazi ghosts ended in depictions of Argentina as even more entangled in and haunted by its Nazi past.

—Victoria Allison

2

: the means by which expiation or atonement is made

Well, all I can do now is to carry out his wishes; that will be my expiation for my neglect.

—Bram Stoker

You wanted to write about the way people left so much food on their plates and crumpled a few dollar bills down, as though it were an offering, expiation for the wasted food.

—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Examples of expiation in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

The result is at once a ghost story, a tale of amour fou, a settling of accounts, and, one senses, a deeply personal act of expiation. —Leslie Camhi, The New Yorker, 11 Oct. 2024

The man who devised the road map for the expiation of German guilt was the philosopher and psychoanalyst Karl Jaspers, who in 1945 gave a series of influential lectures at the University of Heidelberg that were later collected in a book titled The Question of German Guilt. —Orville Schell, Foreign Affairs, 12 Dec. 2017

Apollo was a villain in the first Rocky film, a more nuanced antagonist in the second, a best friend and guru in the third, and a pretext for revenge and the expiation of guilt in the fourth. —Vulture, 4 Feb. 2024

In that lighter air of expiation, women lit candles on the edge of the street that led from the shrine to the place that marked Hussein’s camp on the field of battle. —Aatish Taseer, New York Times, 9 Nov. 2023

Word History

First Known Use

15th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1b