Meaning & use
Indulgences
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Things permitted or granted as pleasures, luxuries, or acts of leniency, or, in Catholic doctrine, the remission of temporal punishment for sins already forgiven.
See it in a sentence
After months of dieting, she allowed herself a few small indulgences on weekends.
The sale of indulgences by the medieval church was one of the practices that provoked the Reformation.
A note on using this word
The word derives from Latin indulgentia, 'kindness, permission'; it carries both an everyday sense of small pleasures and a specific theological meaning.
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Another way to use it
2. noun
the Roman Catholic practice of granting remission of punishment due for sins
Martin Luther's theses attacked the sale of indulgences.
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