empathy
Often confused with sympathy
- 1The ability to understand another person's thoughts, feelings, or point of view, or to identify with them.
Good nurses show empathy for patients who are frightened before surgery.
Years of caring for her own mother gave her deep empathy with families facing dementia.
UsageEmpathy for or with someone means understanding their feelings; sympathy is feeling sorry for them.
Similarunderstanding, sympathy, compassion
Note
A young word built from old parts: English-speaking psychologists coined it in 1908–09, Edward Bradford Titchener most famously, to translate the German Einfühlung, joining Greek en, "in," and páthos, "feeling." The picture is of feeling from inside someone else's situation rather than watching from outside.
- 2A paranormal ability to read another person's emotions by psychic means.
Her empathy let her sense the alien captain's fear from across the bridge of the starship.
The psychic claimed that her empathy allowed her to read the grief of strangers in the audience.
Note
In science fiction and parapsychology the word names a power, not a virtue: emotions are read directly, mind to mind, with no faces or words to go on. Fiction hands it to characters or whole species, and it sits beside telepathy, which can read thoughts as well as feelings. Outside those genres, a character's empathy is taken in the everyday sense, so the context has to signal the psychic reading.
Checked 31 Oct 2026 · 4 facts
- In parapsychology and science fiction, empathy can denote paranormal perception of another person's emotions. en.wiktionary.org
- Fiction gives individual characters paranormal empathy. startrek.com
- Fiction gives whole species empathic abilities. startrek.com
- Telepathy can include psychic transmission of thoughts, feelings, or emotions; it is not restricted to thoughts. en.wiktionary.org
- 3The drug MDMA.
Similarecstasy
Note
A piece of drug slang that has fallen out of use; ecstasy is the street name that survived. Because the everyday meaning is so dominant, a modern reader will not hear the drug in the word without help, and the sense now turns up mainly in older writing about the drug scene. Using it today would read as a deliberate period touch or simply be misunderstood.
Checked 31 Oct 2026 · 2 facts
- Empathy is recorded as obsolete slang for MDMA. en.wiktionary.org
- Ecstasy remains a street name for MDMA. dea.gov
Use it in a sentence
Write your own sentence with empathy, and AI will tell you whether it fits and which meaning you used.
Origin
A 20th-century borrowing from Ancient Greek ἐμπάθεια (empátheia, literally "passion"), from ἐν (en, "in, at") + πάθος (páthos, "feeling"), equivalent to em- + -pathy. Edward Bradford Titchener coined it around 1909 to translate German Einfühlung. In modern Greek, εμπάθεια has the opposite meaning: strong negative feeling and prejudice against someone.
Checked 31 Oct 2026 · 7 facts
- Empathy entered English in the twentieth century through borrowing from Ancient Greek. en.wiktionary.org
- Ancient Greek ἐμπάθεια, transliterated empátheia, means passion. en.wiktionary.org
- Its Greek roots are ἐν, meaning in or at, and πάθος, meaning feeling. en.wiktionary.org
- The English formation is equivalent to em- plus -pathy. en.wiktionary.org
- Edward Bradford Titchener proposed empathy as a translation of German Einfühlung. archive.org
- The term was coined by 1908; 1909 is the publication year of Titchener's Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought-Processes. yalebooks.yale.edu
- Modern Greek εμπάθεια denotes hostile negative feelings toward someone, unlike English empathy. el.wiktionary.org