Refine this word faster
Compersion
Definitions
- 1 Vicarious joy associated with seeing one's partner have a joyful romantic or sexual relationship with another person. neologism, uncountable
- 2 The feeling of joy one has experiencing another's joy, such as in witnessing a toddler's joy and feeling joy in response. neologism, uncountable
"A major component of jealousy, for many people, is the suspicion or resentment of the rival. In Kerista, on the other hand, the relationship that every man had with the other men and that every woman had with the other women elicited what they called "compersion" rather than jealousy. "Compersion is the positive warm feeling you experience when you see two of your partners having fun with each other. It's the antonym of jealousy.""
Etymology
Coined in the early 1990s by a group of members of the Kerista Commune, a polyamorous group based in San Francisco, California, U.S.A., in existence between 1956 and 1991, apparently randomly using an alphabet board (similar to a Ouija board), with -ion (suffix forming nouns). The hypothesis that the word is derived from French compère (“partner”) + English -sion (a variant of -tion (suffix forming nouns)), based on an earlier use of French compérage by the French anthropologist and ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) to denote the practice of brothers-in-law sharing wives observed among Tupi people of the Brazilian Amazon, is less plausible: a website run by former members of the community states that neither the word compérage nor Lévi-Strauss’s work was known to them at the time, and the formation of the word in this way does not correspond to any known morphological process.
See also for "compersion"
Next best steps
Mini challenge
Unscramble this word: compersion