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empathy

nounattested in dialogue

  • //ˈɛmpəθi//

Identification with or understanding of the thoughts, feelings, or emotional state of another person.

noun

  1. 1

    Identification with or understanding of the thoughts, feelings, or emotional state of another person.

    She had a lot of empathy for her neighbor; she knew what it was like to lose a parent too.

    Like your body's in the room but you're not really there / Like you have empathy inside but you don't really care / Like you're fresh outta love but it's been in the air / Am I past repair?

    While Musk said he believes in empathy and that “you should care about other people,” he also thinks it’s destroying society.

  2. 2

    The capacity to understand another person's point of view or the result of such understanding.

  3. 3

    A paranormal ability to psychically read another person's emotions.

  4. 4

    obsoleteMDMA.

Etymology

A twentieth-century borrowing from Ancient Greek ἐμπάθεια (empátheia, literally “passion”) (formed from ἐν (en, “in, at”) + πάθος (páthos, “feeling”)), equivalent to em- + -pathy, coined by Edward Bradford Titchener in 1909 to translate German Einfühlung. The modern word in Greek εμπάθεια (empátheia) has an opposite meaning denoting strong negative feelings and prejudice against someone.

Forms

plural
empathies
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).