Apathy

//ˈæ.pə.θi// noun

noun ·Common ·High school level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    Lack of emotion or motivation; lack of interest or enthusiasm towards something; disinterest (in something). uncountable, usually

    "I opened it with apathy; the theory which he attempts to demonstrate and the wonderful facts which he relates soon changed this feeling into enthusiasm."

  2. 2
    the trait of lacking enthusiasm for or interest in things generally wordnet
  3. 3
    an absence of emotion or enthusiasm wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
indifferenceindifferenceunconcernabeyanceabstractionabulia

Example

More examples

"My apathy for voting comes from my distaste for politics."

Etymology

From French apathie, from Latin apathīa, from Ancient Greek ἀπάθεια (apátheia, “impassibility”, “insensibility”, “freedom from emotion”), from ἀπαθής (apathḗs, “not suffering or having suffered”, “without experience of”), from ἀ- (a-, “not”) + πάθος (páthos, “anything that befalls one”, “incident”, “emotion”, “passion”). Doublet of apatheia, which was borrowed directly from Ancient Greek.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.