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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

compersion.

Vicarious joy associated with seeing one's partner have a joyful romantic or sexual relationship with another person.

10 characters3 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/kəmˈpɜːʒn̩/Received-Pronunciation/-ʃn̩/Received-Pronunciation/kəmˈpɜɹʒən/General-American/-ʃən/General-American
  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
Where this word comes from

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.

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.