The Lexicon of FeelingAll wordsInteractive app

Empathy

[ˈɛmpəθi] · EM-puh-thee · English · noun
mixedintensity: mediumtrust

Feeling with another.

Definition

Feeling with another — sharing or vicariously experiencing another's feelings, thoughts, and experience.

Connotation & usage

Feeling with another — actively sharing or mirroring what they feel (perspective-taking) — as distinct from sympathy (feeling for another, more distanced) and compassion (which adds a motivation to help). It implies entering into and reflecting the other's state rather than viewing it from outside, and retains technical uses in psychology and aesthetics that sympathy lacks.

Senses & usage

Interpersonal (feeling with)

Sharing in and understanding another person's emotional experience.

Now the dominant sense; Merriam-Webster notes this interpersonal use dates to the mid-20th century.

Aesthetic / original

The imaginative projection of one's own feeling into an observed object.

The original sense when the word was coined — translating the aesthetics term Einfühlung.

Related words

Etymology

Coined 1908–09, modeled on German Einfühlung “feeling-into” (Lotze, 1858), itself rendering Greek empatheia (en “in” + pathos “feeling”). The English coinage is credited to psychologist Edward Titchener.

How it has changed

A genuine 20th-century coinage. It entered English as a technical term in the theory of art appreciation (the viewer projecting feeling into an object); the now-dominant interpersonal sense — sharing another person's feelings — dates to the mid-20th century. A well-sourced shift.

Sources

Explore “Empathy” in the interactive dictionary →
From The Lexicon of Feeling — a carefully sourced dictionary & thesaurus of emotions across 60 languages. Definitions are verified against the cited sources; emotion-family, valence, and intensity tags are editorial. This is a learning tool for emotional vocabulary, not therapy or a substitute for professional care. © 2026 The Lexicon of Feeling.