Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun An acknowledgment of a personal error or fault.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • phrase My fault, due to my error; my bad.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun an acknowledgment of your error or guilt

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Latin meā culpā, through my fault : meā, feminine ablative of meus, my + culpā, ablative of culpa, fault.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From the Latin phrase meā culpā ("through my fault"), from mea ("my, mine") and culpa ("fault") in the ablative

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Examples

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Comments

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  • Latin. (my fault)

    March 14, 2009

  • Listen up, everybody. We can all relax now. ext11 did it.

    March 14, 2009

  • I once had a friend in St. Petersburg whose name was Maya Kulpa (Ма�? Кульпа), and her brother was Maksim Kulpa (Мак�?им Кульпа). It was hard to resist the temptation to refer to them collectively as Mea Maxima Culpa.

    March 14, 2009

  • Haha! Seriously? Were they deliberately named for that reason?

    March 14, 2009

  • No, Maya and Maksim are fairly common Russian names, though the surname Kulpa is unusual. But such things do occur. I have a good friend in Ljubljana named Tadej (the Slovene version of Thaddaeus), which is pronounced a lot like the English word "today". His sister's name is Tamara, with the stress on the second syllable.

    March 15, 2009

  • You have quite a few "wordplay" friends, it seems! :-)

    March 16, 2009

  • I guess I attract them.

    March 16, 2009

  • One of my classmates in graduate school was called Greg Samsa. And I worked with a woman called Laurel Hardy.

    I blame the parents.

    March 16, 2009

  • I think attracting them is a good thing, rolig.

    March 16, 2009

  • i am fascinated by the russian language, i wanted to get this tattoo, but i thought it would be completely inappropriate. Even if i made it a euphemism for the Lord

    June 21, 2009