Definition of "profess" []

• To affirm openly; declare or claim: "a physics major [who] professes to be a stickler when it comes to data” ( Gina Maranto). (verb-transitive)
• To make a pretense of; pretend: "top officials who were deeply involved with the arms sales but later professed ignorance of them” ( David Johnston). (verb-transitive)
• To practice as a profession or claim knowledge of: profess medicine. (verb-transitive)
• To teach (a subject) as a professor: profess literature. (verb-transitive)
• To affirm belief in: profess Catholicism. (verb-transitive)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "For instance, when these churchmen again profess and put their signatures to those anti-liberal documents, then we know that they too have got out of their Hegelianism."
• "The system of Optimism, to which I assent & which I therefore profess, is not without difficulties, great & many. but every other system appears to me to have more"
• "Do we not therein profess to be in friendship, and to have fellowship, with him?"