Skip to content
Allin

emotion

nouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ɪˈməʊ.ʃən//
  • Canada//ɪˈmoʊ.ʃən//
  • Canada//iˈmoʊ.ʃən//

A person's internal state of being and involuntary physiological response to an object or a situation, based on or tied to physical state and sensory data.

noun

  1. 1

    obsoleteMovement; agitation.

    and the water continuing in the caverns[…]caused the emotion or earthquake

  2. 2

    A person's internal state of being and involuntary physiological response to an object or a situation, based on or tied to physical state and sensory data.

    He was thinking; but the glory of the song, the swell from the great organ, the clustered lights, […], the height and vastness of this noble fane, its antiquity and its strength—all these things seemed to have their part as causes of the thrilling emotion that accompanied his thoughts.

    “Just think about the last big decision you made. How much of it was based in emotion and how much was based in intellect? Most all big decisions are based in both.” […] Historically, placing weight on emotions has been dismissed. “What’s remarkable is that for so many years, people didn’t see emotions as conveying important messages,” he says.

  3. 3

    A reaction by a non-human organism with behavioral and physiological elements similar to a person's response.

Etymology

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *h₁éǵʰ Proto-Indo-European *-s Proto-Indo-European *h₁éǵʰs Proto-Italic *eks Latin ex Latin ex- Proto-Indo-European *m(y)ewh₁- Proto-Indo-European *-yeti Proto-Indo-European *-éyeti Proto-Indo-European *m(y)owh₁éyeti Proto-Italic *moweō Latin moveō Latin ēmoveō Vulgar Latin *exmovēre Old French esmovoir Middle French esmouvoir Middle French emotionbor. English emotion Borrowed from Middle French emotion (modern French émotion), from émouvoir (“excite”), based on Latin ēmōtus, past participle of ēmoveō (“to move out, move away, remove, stir up, irritate”), from ē- (“out”) (variant of ex-), and moveō (“move”).

Forms

plural
emotions
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).