'Conscience' is Latin for 'knowing with oneself' — your inner witness to your own moral choices.
A person's moral sense of right and wrong, especially as it guides behaviour; an inner feeling that acts as a guide to the rightness or wrongness of one's actions.
From Old French 'conscience,' from Latin 'cōnscientia,' meaning 'joint knowledge, awareness, moral sense,' from 'cōnscīre' (to be mutually aware, to know with oneself), composed of 'con-' (with, together) and 'scīre' (to know). The literal meaning is 'knowing with oneself' — an internal witness to one's own actions. Latin 'scīre' derives from Proto-Indo-European *skey- (to cut, to split, to separate), the idea being that knowledge involves distinguishing or separating things. Key roots: con- (Latin: "with, together
German 'Gewissen' (conscience) is a calque — a literal translation — of Latin 'cōnscientia.' 'Ge-' corresponds to 'con-' (together/with), and 'wissen' means 'to know.' Both words mean 'knowing with oneself.' This parallel formation shows how deeply the Latin concept influenced Germanic languages even when they coined their own words rather than borrowing.