Pity

How to spell pity

4 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce pity

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does pity mean?

1. nounA feeling of sorrow and sympathy for the suffering or misfortune of others.
2. nounA cause for regret or disappointment; an unfortunate circumstance.
3. verbTo feel sorrow and sympathy for someone in difficulty or distress.

Pity in a sentence

• noun

  She felt deep pity for the stranded passengers at the airport.

• noun

  It is a great pity that the concert was cancelled by the storm.

• verb

  I pity anyone who has to commute through that traffic every day.

• noun

  The manager showed no pity when he cut the overtime pay.

• noun

  What a pity that they sold the cottage before we could visit.

• verb

  The nurses came to pity the patients who had no family visiting.

Where does pity come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Pity travelled into English from the Old French word pité, which meant compassion or mercy, and that French word came straight from the Latin pietas, meaning dutifulness, devotion, and tender feeling toward others. In classical Latin pietas described the respect a person owed to family, country, and the gods, so its earliest flavour was closer to religious duty than to sorrow for the suffering. As the word moved through French and into English in the 1200s, the sense narrowed toward the kindly sorrow we feel for someone in distress. Latin pietas is also the direct ancestor of the English word piety, so pity and piety are essentially the same word that split into two spellings and two meanings. The shortening to a single syllable with the soft -ty ending is what gives the word its slightly slippery spelling, since the unstressed second part sounds like the common -ity ending but is written simply -ty.

How the word is built

• piet- (from Latin pietas: dutifulness, compassion)
• -y (noun suffix, via Old French)