emotion
Pluralemotions
- 1An internal state and involuntary bodily response to a thing or situation, shaped by physical state and the senses.
Like weather inside the body: a felt state that arrives with physical signs before you can name it.
Grief is the emotion most people struggle to put into words.
The therapist asked her to name the emotion behind her sudden anger.
Note
The inward turn of the old "stirring" sense: what once shook the ground came to name what stirs a person. It works as both a mass noun and a count noun. Uncountable, it stands against reason, as when Susanne Gargiulo's 2011 CNN piece asks how much of a decision was "based in emotion and how much was based in intellect." Countable, it names particular feelings such as grief or anger.
- 2A response in a non-human organism that has behavioral and physical features resembling a person's emotional reaction.
Elephants appear to express emotion when they gather around the bones of a dead herd member.
Studies of rats suggest they experience emotion during play, including something close to joy.
Similarfeeling
- 3A physical stirring or agitation; the moving about of something.
Note
Here the word still means what its Latin parts say: Middle French emotion, from émouvoir "excite", built on Latin ēmōtus, "moved out, stirred up". Philosophical Transactions in 1758 could write of water in caverns that "caused the emotion or earthquake": a shaking of the ground, not of the heart. The sense is obsolete. In older texts, read it as physical motion, and do not revive it in modern writing.
Practice
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Origin
It was borrowed from Middle French emotion (modern French émotion), from émouvoir ("excite"), based on Latin ēmōtus, the past participle of ēmoveō ("to move out, stir up"), from ē- (a variant of ex-, "out") and moveō ("move").