pathos

Etymology

It is borrowed from Ancient Greek πάθος (páthos, “suffering, feeling, emotion, passion”),^[2][3][4][5] from the stem of πάσχω (páskhō, “to suffer”),^[2][6] and related to πένθος (pénthos, “grief, sorrow”).^[3][4][5][7] The OED calls the Greek verb of unknown origin,^[2] but Etymonline, the American Heritage Dictionary and Barnhart derive it from Proto-Indo-European *kwent(h)- (“to suffer”),^[4][8][3] and Barnhart and Merriam-Webster compare Old Irish cēssaim (“I suffer”) and Latvian ciest (“to suffer”);^[3][6] Klein calls these and Lithuanian kęsti (“to suffer”) only probable cognates.^[7] Post-classical Latin also had the word in rhetoric, from the 4th century.^[2]

Earliest recorded meaning

A moving expression or passage in a text, 1579, in E. K.'s gloss to Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender.^[2][9] Dictionary.com also dates the word to the 1570s,^[10] Merriam-Webster gives 1591,^[6] and Etymonline, Barnhart and the Oxford Dictionary of English date it to the 17th century, having only the later sense.^[4][3][11]

Semantic evolution

In Greek the word meant anything that happens to a person and is felt: experience, suffering, emotion.^[6][4] English took it first for an utterance that moves pity, a use now rare.^[2][9] From there it passed to the quality itself, the power of a work or speech to stir pity or sadness, first recorded in Dryden's Of Dramatick Poesie (1668).^[2][3] A plain sense "suffering", recorded from 1684 in a translation of Blankaart's Physical Dictionary, was rare and died out in the 19th century.^[2][9] From 1739 the word also served for the emotional and transient side of things, as against ethos.^[2][6] Collins and Merriam-Webster add a further shift from the quality to the feeling it causes, a pang of sympathy or pity.^[12][6]

Timeline

• 1579 – an expression or passage that evokes sadness or sympathy.^[2][9]
• 1668 – the quality that evokes pity or sadness, in Dryden.^[2][3]
• 1684 – physical or mental suffering (obsolete by 1842).^[2]
• 1739 – the emotional and transient, contrasted with ethos.^[2]

Meanings

Noun

1. The quality in literature, speech or events that arouses pity or sorrow: the pathos of the orphan's letter.^[12][6][2]
2. A feeling of sympathetic pity.^[12][6]
3. The transient or emotional element in an experience or a work of art, as opposed to ethos.^[6][2]
4. (rare) A moving utterance or passage.^[2][9]
5. (obsolete, 1684–1842) Physical or mental suffering.^[2][9]

Related words

• antipathy
• apathy
• empathy
• pathetic
• pathology
• pathogen
• psychopathy
• sympathy
• bathos
• nepenthe

References

1. ^ a b Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
3. ^ a b c d e f g Barnhart, Robert K. (1988), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology
4. ^ a b c d e Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
5. ^ a b Hoad, T. F., ed. (1986), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Oxford: Clarendon Press
6. ^ a b c d e f g h i Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
7. ^ a b Klein, Ernest. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1966–1967.
8. ^ The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (online 2024), 5th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
9. ^ a b c d e f Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2002), 5th ed., ed. William R. Trumble and Angus Stevenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press
10. ^ Dictionary.com Unabridged (2016), based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, New York: Random House
11. ^ Stevenson, Angus, ed. (2010), Oxford Dictionary of English, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
12. ^ a b c Collins English Dictionary (2023), Glasgow: HarperCollins