exculpation

1. 1.

   a defense of some offensive behavior or some failure to keep a promise etc.

   “he kept finding excuses to stay”

   “every day he had a new alibi for not getting a job”

   “his transparent self-justification was unacceptable”

   Synonymsexcusealibiself-justification

   Broaderdefense

   Narrowerextenuation
2. 2.

   the act of freeing from guilt or blame

   Broaderforgiveness

Other forms of exculpation

plural

exculpations·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about exculpation

What does exculpation mean?

exculpation means "a defense of some offensive behavior or some failure to keep a promise etc.". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in exculpation?

exculpation has 5 syllables: ex-cul-pa-ti-on. The stress falls on "ti".

What is another word for exculpation?

Close synonyms include excuse, alibi, self-justification. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is exculpation a common word?

exculpation is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.