empathy

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English

Etymology

A twentieth-century borrowing from Ancient Greek ἐμπάθεια (empátheia, literally “passion”) (formed from ἐν (en, “in, at”) + πάθος (páthos, “feeling”)), coined by Edward Bradford Titchener in 1909 to translate German Einfühlung. The modern word in Greek εμπάθεια (empátheia) has an opposite meaning denoting strong negative feelings and prejudice against someone.

Pronunciation

Noun

empathy (countable and uncountable, plural empathies)

  1. Identification with or understanding of the thoughts, feelings, or emotional state of another person.
    She had a lot of empathy for her neighbor; she knew what it was like to lose a parent too.
  2. Capacity to understand another person's point of view or the result of such understanding.
  3. (parapsychology, science fiction) A paranormal ability to psychically read another person's emotions.
  4. (obsolete slang) MDMA.
    Synonym: ecstasy

Usage notes

Used similarly to sympathy, interchangeably in looser usage. In stricter usage, empathy is stronger and more intimate, meaning that the subject understands and shares an emotion with the object—as in “I feel your pain”—while sympathy is weaker and more distant—concern, but not shared emotion: “I care for you”.

Translations

See also

Further reading

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