Empathy
/ˈɛmpəθi/ noun, slang
noun, slang ·Common ·High school level
Definitions
Noun
- 1 Identification with or understanding of the thoughts, feelings, or emotional state of another person. countable, uncountable
"She had a lot of empathy for her neighbor; she knew what it was like to lose a parent too."
- 2 understanding and entering into another's feelings wordnet
- 3 The capacity to understand another person's point of view or the result of such understanding. countable, uncountable
- 4 A paranormal ability to psychically read another person's emotions. countable, uncountable
- 5 MDMA. countable, obsolete, slang, uncountable
Example
More examples"Nothing is more important than empathy."
Etymology
A twentieth-century borrowing from Ancient Greek ἐμπάθεια (empátheia, literally “passion”) (formed from ἐν (en, “in, at”) + πάθος (páthos, “feeling”)), equivalent to em- + -pathy, 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.