Sympathy
/ˈsɪmpəθi/noun
Shared feeling with another person's situation, especially their sorrow.
The Greek roots
Literally: “feeling together”
The story of the word
The first English sense, in the 1570s, was not emotional at all. It named a hidden affinity by which one thing acts on another at a distance, the way a struck string sets an untouched one humming across the room. That physical meaning survives in sympathetic vibration and in the sympathetic nervous system. Pity took over the word during the 17th century, and Latin had already translated the Greek piece by piece as compassio, which is why compassion says the same thing twice over.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1570s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
In a sentence
He listened without saying much, which was the only sympathy she wanted.
The strike drew sympathy from people who had never met a docker.