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compassion

kuhm-PASH-uhn/kəmˈpæʃ.ən/

Verbcompassions, compassioning, compassioned

3 meanings of compassion

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  1. 1
    noununcountable
    Deep awareness of another person's suffering, together with a wish to relieve it.

    Like a warmth that turns concern for another's pain into the urge to act.

    The nurse treated every patient with genuine compassion, no matter how difficult they were.

    Acts of compassion toward strangers can slowly transform an entire community.

    Similarsympathy, empathy, kindness, mercy, tenderness

    Oppositeindifference, cruelty, callousness, heartlessness

    Note

    The word carries its own explanation: Latin com- "together" plus pati "to suffer". To feel compassion is literally to suffer with someone, and the same pati sits behind passion. It is usually uncountable, but older devotional prose could count it: Robert Leighton in 1849 praises "the Father of mercies and compassions." In ordinary modern use, people show compassion, feel it, or lack it.

  2. 2
    noununcountable
    Deep awareness of the individual experiences of suffering, whether one's own or another's, together with the motivation to relieve them: the basis of the term self-compassion.

    Like turning the same gentleness you'd offer a hurting friend back toward yourself.

    Psychologists found that showing compassion toward oneself reduces anxiety after failure.

    The program trains people to extend compassion to their own struggles as well as to others'.

    Similarkindness, understanding

    Oppositeindifference, harshness

    Note

    Psychology's extension of the word turns it inward. The suffering attended to may be one's own, and self-compassion names that self-directed form. Where the everyday sense looks outward, this one treats the self and others as one circle. In Dusana Dorjee's Mind, Brain and the Path to Happiness (2013), meditation on compassion toward one's own experience is the foundation from which that circle widens to others.

  3. 3
    verbobsolete
    To feel pity for someone in their suffering; to be moved by another's distress.
    O heavens, can you hear a good man groan / And not relent, or not compassion him?
    c. 1588, William Shakespeare, “The Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus”
    The widow's tears flowed wildly. / But Oh! a harbinger of life approached — / God, manifest in flesh — compassioned her, / And bade her weep no more.
    1836, William A. Brewer, The Widow's Son

    Similarpity, commiserate, rue, condole

    Note

    A verb now out of use, though it had a long run. Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus asks whether the heavens can hear a good man groan "and not compassion him," and William A. Brewer still writes in 1836 that God made flesh "compassioned her." It takes a direct object, with no for. Its participle could also serve as an adjective, as in "a kind, compassioning adviser." In modern prose, pity does this job instead.

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Origin

This word came through Middle English and Old French from Ecclesiastical Latin compassio ('sympathy'), which goes back to Latin compati ('to suffer together with'), formed from com- ('together') and pati ('to suffer').