guilt: the culpability a person or community incurs by doing wrong, together with the liability to punishment or repayment it brings
This word names guilt as an objective fact, not as a feeling. When someone sins, a real debt of culpability comes into being and clings to them, and that debt is what this word points to. It is the condition of standing in the wrong before God, along with everything that condition now owes: the wrath it invites, the penalty it earns, the reparation it must make.
That objective weight shows up in how the word behaves. Guilt can be small or it can be "great"; it can "grow up to the heavens" and pile up over generations, as it does in the long confessions of Ezra. One person's act can "bring guilt" on a whole nation, so the word carries easily from an individual to a community. And because it is a debt, it presses toward being settled, whether by punishment falling or by an offering made.
The related noun אָשָׁם names the offering or repayment that answers such guilt, and the broader עָוֺן stretches across the crooked deed, its guilt, and its punishment all at once. This word keeps a tighter focus: the culpability itself, the being-in-the-wrong that has to be dealt with.