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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

empathy.

Identification with or understanding of the thoughts, feelings, or emotional state of another person.

7 characters3 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/ˈɛmpəθi/
  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. The capacity to understand another person's point of view or the result of such understanding.

    countable · uncountable
  3. A paranormal ability to psychically read another person's emotions.

    countable · uncountable
  4. MDMA.

    countable · obsolete · slang · uncountable
Where this word comes from

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.

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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.