sympathetic

Pluralsympathetics

1. 1
   adjective

   Feeling, showing, or marked by understanding and concern for another person's suffering or situation.

   He listened with a sympathetic ear as she described her difficult week.

   Her sympathetic response made the grieving patient feel truly understood.

   Similarcompassionate, understanding, caring, supportive

   Oppositeunsympathetic

   Note

   Fellow feeling was not the word's first job. It arrived in the mid-17th century naming an affinity or paranormal influence, a meaning that survives in sympathetic magic. Here it takes "to" before what is felt for, as when C. L. R. James's The Black Jacobins (1963) calls Vaublanc sympathetic to the sorrows of workers in France. Keep it apart from the "approving" meaning: compassion for suffering is not support for a cause. Its opposite is unsympathetic.

2. 2
   adjective

   Inclined to approve of or feel favorable toward an idea, cause, or action.

   Several senators proved sympathetic to the proposed reforms.

   The editor was sympathetic to the movement and gave it generous coverage.

   Similarapproving

   Oppositeunsympathetic

   Note

   Here the warmth is directed at an idea or proposal rather than at a person in trouble. The construction matches the feeling sense, sympathetic to, so the object decides the reading. Sympathetic to the strikers' grief is compassion; sympathetic to their demands is something close to approving. Unsympathetic flips the same way and means opposed.

3. 3
   adjective

   Having qualities that draw the liking and warm regard of other people.

   Her quick wit and kindness made her a thoroughly sympathetic colleague.

   Despite his rough manners, the old sailor was oddly sympathetic.

   Similarlikable, pleasant, appealing, congenial

   Oppositeunsympathetic, unlikable, unpleasant

4. 4
   adjective

   Relating to the division of the autonomic nervous system that arises near the spinal cord and prepares the body for stress, balancing the parasympathetic nerves.

   Activation of the sympathetic nervous system raises heart rate and dilates the pupils.

   Surgeons must work carefully near the sympathetic chain running alongside the spine.

   Oppositeparasympathetic

   Note

   The anatomist's sense almost always stands beside its opposite, parasympathetic, because the two divisions balance each other. It appears in fixed phrases: the sympathetic nervous system, sympathetic innervation, sympathetic nerve endings. Its chemistry is adrenaline, also called epinephrine. Leslie Iversen's 1967 study proposes that adrenaline is released at sympathetic nerve endings.

5. 5
   adjective

   Relating to musical tones that arise when one string vibrates in response to another, or to strings tuned to resonate freely when other notes sound.

   The viola d'amore produces a shimmering sound thanks to its sympathetic strings.

   Luthiers tune the sympathetic strings to match the instrument's main scale.

   Note

   Acoustics gives the adjective a literal picture: one string answers another's vibration. Sympathetic vibration names the effect itself. Sympathetic strings are extra strings tuned so that they sound by that effect when the played strings excite them, and the tones they add are sympathetic tones. It is the physical cousin of the 'affinity' sense, with the affinity made audible.

6. 6
   adjective

   Relating to or producing an effect that arises through a natural affinity, interdependence, or mutual connection between things.

   Engineers feared a sympathetic detonation if one stored shell exploded near the rest.

   The two pendulums settled into a sympathetic swing, each nudging the other.

   Note

   Closest to where the word began: it entered English in the mid-17th century meaning "relating to an affinity or paranormal influence," from Latin sympathēticus. Here nobody feels anything. One thing simply acts on another through a connection between them. It lives mostly in fixed pairings such as sympathetic ink and sympathetic magic, it always comes before the noun, and it does not take degrees.

7. 7
   adjective

   In magical belief, denoting a supernatural connection or power that arises because two objects share the same form or some other correspondence.

   Practitioners of sympathetic magic burned a wax figure to harm a distant enemy.

   The ritual relied on a sympathetic bond between the carved totem and the hunted deer.

   Note

   Magic built on hidden correspondence, where working on something of the same form is meant to reach its counterpart. The adjective rarely strays from the phrase sympathetic magic. Rollo Ahmed's The Black Art (1936) puts "sympathetic" in scare quotes when describing a weapon salve that he traces to Paracelsus. That punctuation shows a writer describing a belief rather than endorsing it.

8. 8
   adjective

   Designed in a sensitive and fitting way, so it suits its setting or purpose well.

   The architects produced a sympathetic extension that blended with the historic facade.

   Planners praised the sympathetic restoration of the riverside mill.

   Similarsensitive, appropriate, fitting

   Oppositeunsympathetic, insensitive

   Note

   A builder's term that takes the 'likeable' meaning and applies it to work rather than people. A sympathetic extension, conversion or restoration fits what is already there instead of clashing with it. The word pairs naturally with to, as in sympathetic to its setting or to the original building.

9. 9
   nouncountable

   A nerve of the sympathetic division of the autonomic nervous system.

   The cervical sympathetic carries fibers that widen the pupil.

   Anatomists mapped each sympathetic branching toward the abdominal organs.

   Note

   Here the adjective has become a noun, as anatomists shorten sympathetic nerve to a single word. It takes an ordinary plural, sympathetics. It can also carry a location in front of it, as in the cervical sympathetic. Outside anatomy and medicine, the full phrase sympathetic nerve is the safer choice.

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