Emotion
noun ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 Movement; agitation. countable, obsolete, uncountable
"and the water continuing in the caverns[…]caused the emotion or earthquake"
- 2 any strong feeling wordnet
- 3 A person's internal state of being and involuntary physiological response to an object or a situation, based on or tied to physical state and sensory data. countable, uncountable
"He was thinking; but the glory of the song, the swell from the great organ, the clustered lights, […], the height and vastness of this noble fane, its antiquity and its strength—all these things seemed to have their part as causes of the thrilling emotion that accompanied his thoughts."
- 4 A reaction by a non-human organism with behavioral and physiological elements similar to a person's response. countable, uncountable
Example
More examples"So great was his emotion that he could not utter a word."
Etymology
Borrowed from Middle French emotion (modern French émotion), from émouvoir (“excite”), based on Latin ēmōtus, past participle of ēmoveō (“to move out, move away, remove, stir up, irritate”), from ē- (“out”) (variant of ex-), and moveō (“move”).
Related phrases
More for "emotion"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.