Word Confusion: Empathy versus Sympathy

Plural: empathies

Plural: sympathies

• The power of understanding and imaginatively entering into another person’s feelings

The imaginative ascribing to an object, as a natural object or work of art, feelings, or attitudes present in oneself

[Cultural] Identifying oneself completely with an object or person, sometimes even to the point of responding physically, as when, watching a baseball player swing at a pitch, one feels one’s own muscles flex

[Medicine] Direct identification with, understanding of, and vicarious experience of another person’s situation, feelings, and motives

• The projection of one’s own feelings or emotional state onto an object or animal

Noun:
Feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else’s misfortune

• [one’s sympathies] The formal expression of pity or sorrow for someone else’s misfortune
• Condolences

Understanding between people

• Common feeling
• [sympathies] Support in the form of shared feelings or opinions
  • Feelings or impulses of compassion
  • Feelings of favor, support, or loyalty
• Agreement with or approval of an opinion or aim
• A favorable attitude
• [in sympathy] Relating harmoniously to something else
• In keeping

The fact or power of sharing the feelings of another, especially in sorrow or trouble; fellow feeling, compassion, or commiseration

Jane is overcome with empathy over Jenny’s bad luck.

Such a metaphor betrays a complete lack of understanding, of empathy with Victorian culture.

There is a frightening lack of empathy and of understanding of the condition of the elderly.

The money will be used to fund an initiative designed to help offenders develop empathy with their victims.

All art criticism is necessarily subjective, but such complete empathy with an artist is rare.

By means of empathy, a great painting becomes a mirror of the self.

Sharing stories is a powerful way to promote empathy.

I’ll bet any man, watching an actor on-screen get kneed in the groin, will empathize with his pain.

Medical educators and professional bodies increasingly recognize the importance of empathy, but they define empathy in a special way to be consistent with the overarching norm of detachment (Halpern).

Oh, please, you’re getting sympathy votes.

Noun:
They had great sympathy for the flood victims.

All Tony’s friends joined in sending their sympathies to his widow, Jean.

The special sympathy between the two boys was obvious to all.

His sympathies lay with his constituents.

It’s hard to tell where your sympathies lie.

He viewed the plan with sympathy and publicly backed it.

I have some sympathy for this view.

Repairs had to be in sympathy with the original structure.

The magnetic field oscillates in sympathy.

At first, sympathy was a magical notion in reference to medicines that heal wounds when applied to a cloth stained with blood from the wound.

By the 1570s, from the Middle French sympathie meaning affinity between certain things, from the Late Latin sympathia meaning community of feeling, sympathy, from the Greek sympatheia, which is from sympathes meaning having a fellow feeling, affected by like feelings, which is from sun- (with) + pathos (feeling).

By the 1590s, it took on the meaning of conformity of feelings.

By the 1660s, the sense of fellow feeling was first attested.