Pathetic

How to spell pathetic

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce pathetic

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does pathetic mean?

1. adjectiveArousing pity, sadness, or sympathy because of vulnerability or misfortune.
2. adjectiveSo feeble or inadequate as to deserve contempt rather than respect.

Pathetic in a sentence

• The abandoned dog gave a pathetic whimper from inside the crate.

• The company offered a pathetic apology that satisfied none of the customers.

• There was something pathetic about the empty house still decorated for a party.

• His pathetic excuse for missing the deadline convinced no one at the meeting.

Where does pathetic come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word traces back to the Greek pathetikos, meaning 'sensitive' or 'capable of feeling', which was built on pathos, the Greek noun for 'suffering, experience, or emotion'. It came into English in the late 1500s by way of the Late Latin patheticus and the French pathetique, at first carrying the dignified sense of 'moving the emotions' or 'stirring deep feeling'. Over the centuries the word drifted downward in tone, so that something pathetic moved from being genuinely touching to being merely pitiful, and finally, in casual modern use, to being feebly inadequate or contemptible. The same pathos root sits inside a family of relatives such as sympathy, empathy, and apathy, all of which deal with feeling, and recognising that shared 'path' element helps fix the spelling. The trap for writers is the unstressed first vowel, which sounds like a vague schwa but is written as an 'a', echoing the original pathos.

How the word is built

• path- (from Greek pathos: feeling, suffering)
• -etic (adjective suffix forming 'relating to')