# empathy

Pronunciation: US say "EM-puh-thee" /ˈɛmpəθi/; UK

## Noun

1. The ability to understand another person's thoughts, feelings, or point of view, or to identify with them.
   - Simple: The ability to understand how another person feels and what they think.
   - _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._
2. A paranormal ability to read another person's emotions by psychic means.
   - Simple: A power beyond the normal senses to know what another person is feeling.
   - _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._

## Noun

3. The drug MDMA. *(obsolete)*
   - Simple: A drug called MDMA.

## 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.

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/empathy (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).