Definition of "assurance" []

• The act of assuring. (noun)
• A statement or indication that inspires confidence; a guarantee or pledge: gave her assurance that the plan would succeed. (noun)
• Freedom from doubt; certainty: set sail in the assurance of favorable winds. See Synonyms at certainty. (noun)
• Self-confidence. See Synonyms at confidence. (noun)
• Excessive self-confidence; presumption. (noun)

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.

• "The promise that his house should be blessed was intended as a compensation for the disappointment of his wish to build the temple, and hence this assurance is appropriately repeated at the conclusion of the prophet's address [Bertheau]."
• "'I suspect, however, that, if we were able to get a bird's-eye view of his mind and all its workings, we should discover that what he called assurance was not the condition you would call such."
• "As illustrated by the BP disaster, we when, as a society, push technology to its limits on a large scale, for whatever reason, the implications of a technological or systems failure are getting to the point where we require absolute safety in operation of those systems – and obtaining such assurance is never inexpensive … and sometimes not even possible."