Empathy

How to spell empathy

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce empathy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does empathy mean?

1. nounThe ability to understand and share another person's feelings as if they were your own.

Empathy in a sentence

• Good nurses combine technical skill with genuine empathy for their patients.

• The manager handled the redundancies with rare tact and empathy.

Where does empathy come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word comes from the Greek empatheia, which literally meant 'in feeling' or 'passion', built from en 'in' and pathos 'feeling, suffering'. The modern psychological sense is surprisingly recent: in the early 1900s English writers needed a term for the German Einfuehlung, meaning 'feeling into' a work of art or another person, and coined 'empathy' on the model of the older 'sympathy'. The shared root pathos also gives us sympathy 'feeling with', apathy 'without feeling', and pathos itself, which is why all these words carry the same -path- spine. Because the word was deliberately built from Greek parts rather than inherited, its spelling is quite regular, though the unstressed middle syllable and the 'em-' opening can still trip writers who reach for 'im-'. Keeping the link to pathos in mind anchors both the meaning and the path spelling.

How the word is built

• em- (in, into)
• path (feeling, from Greek pathos)
• -y (noun suffix)