These words involve the transfer or responsibility to someone else. Entrust stresses safety and reliance. A person may be entrusted with authority or with a specific task: to entrust an agent with power of attorney. A thing entrusted may be a specialized task or an object that needs to be protected: entrusting all jewellery and important documents to a safety-deposit box; entrusting the election campaign to a public-relations firm. Confide gives more intense overtones of safety, caution or discretion: confiding the enforcement of the new regulations to the security officer. In this sense, it is more formal and old fashioned than entrust and has been overshadowed by other meanings of confide not directly related here.

Commit and consign are less personal than entrust and are more formal in this context. At its most general, commit means to place a person or thing in someone else’s charge: committing the child to a nurse’s care. Specifically, it may involve the placing of a person in protective custody: to commit someone to a mental hospital. The word often carries an undertone of giving something up for better or worse to forces beyond one’s control: committing their chances for survival to the prospect of being sighted by a passing ship or plane. Consign suggests great impersonality and has a legalistic or commercial flavour: consigning the spare parts by passenger train. In other cases, the word may suggest criticism for a lack of concern that allows power to fall into the wrong hands: consigning his most basic rights to the hazards of a kangaroo court. Both commit and consign may also sometimes focus on the fact of getting rid of a thing for good and all: to commit a paper to the flames; a critic airily consigning an author to oblivion.

Delegate is the most neutral word of this group, implying neither the security and confidence of some, nor the impersonality of others. Its tone is one of mere description without evaluation. It suggests a bureaucratic context in which a leading executive is responsible for work he must nonetheless allow others to execute: the fatal flaw of being unable to delegate authority; delegating all but the most serious matters to a crack team of assistants.