Feeling for another.
Feeling for another — sincere concern or sorrow on someone's behalf; also an affinity or harmony between people or things.
Feeling for another — concern, sorrow, or pity on their behalf — and more distanced than empathy, which shares in the feeling itself. Compassion adds to it an urgent desire to relieve the distress. Broader than the others, with senses they don't share: loyalty/support (“in sympathy with the strikers”) and harmony/affinity (“markets rising in sympathy”). Conventional in condolence (“my deepest sympathies”).
1580s, originally “affinity between things,” from Greek sympatheia “fellow-feeling,” from syn- “together” + pathos “feeling.”
Once notably broader and the older of the overlapping trio: from “affinity between things” (1580s) to “agreement of feelings” (1590s) to “commiseration with another's suffering” (c. 1600). It once carried the “sharing another's feelings” meaning now labeled dated — which helped prompt the coining of empathy in the early 20th century to carve off that sense.