Confidence is trusting your own ability; arrogance is overrating it at other people's expense. Her confidence grew with every performance, but his arrogance made it hard for the team to trust his decisions.
The core difference
Confidence is a fair sense of your own ability, while arrogance is an excessive one that disrespects other people.
- confidence — self-assurance and belief in your own abilities: He answered the interview questions with real confidence.
- arrogance — an excessive sense of your own importance, often shown through disrespect for others: She spoke with a quiet arrogance that put people off.
How to tell them apart
The line between the two is other people. Confidence is inward-facing: it describes what you believe about yourself. Arrogance adds an outward-facing element, an excessive self-regard that shows up as disrespect for others, whether that is dismissing their opinions or refusing to consider they might be right.
The words also come from different places. Arrogance traces to Latin arrogare, "to claim for oneself," which fits its sense of overreach. Confidence goes back to Latin confidere, "to trust fully," a word about trust rather than claiming anything from anyone else.
