profess

verb professes · professing · professed

1. transitive To administer the vows of a religious order to (someone); to admit to a religious order. This swayed the balance decisively in Mary's favour, and she was professed on 8 September 1578.
2. reflexive To declare oneself (to be something). They've professed themselves delighted with the results.
3. ambitransitive To declare; to assert, affirm. Having professed her belief in the remedy, she had little choice but to try it.
4. transitive To make a claim (to be something); to lay claim to (a given quality, feeling etc.), often with connotations of insincerity. Many profess to despise what secretly they hunger after.
5. transitive To declare one's adherence to (a religion, deity, principle etc.). [N]ow ſuch a liue vngodly, vvithout a care of doing the wil of the Lord (though they profeſſe him in their mouths, yea though they beleeue and acknowledge all the Articles of the Creed, yea haue knowledge of the Scripturs) yet if they liue vngodly, they deny God, and therefore ſhal be denied, […]
6. transitive To work as a professor of; to teach. he was a Spaniard, who about two hundred yeeres since professed Physicke in Tholouse[…].
7. archaic, transitive To claim to have knowledge or understanding of (a given area of interest, subject matter).