Words & WritingGreek → English
Pathos
/ˈpeɪθɑːs/noun
The quality in a work or a situation that produces pity or sorrow in whoever meets it.
The Greek roots
πάθος
páthos
suffering, feeling
Literally: “what happens to you”
Follow a root:πάθος19 words
The story of the word
πάθος is anything undergone rather than done. The verb πάσχω means I have something done to me, which is why the same root covers an experience, an illness and an emotion without changing shape. Aristotle set it beside ethos and logos as the appeal aimed at the audience's feelings. English took it in the 1660s, and by 1727 Alexander Pope had built bathos out of the Greek word for depth as a joke on writers who aim at pathos and land in the ridiculous.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → English
- First recorded
- 1660s
Same family
sympathyapathypathologypathetic
In a sentence
The pathos of the last scene is entirely in what nobody says.
There is real pathos in a stadium half empty on a farewell night.