Compassion is feeling another person's pain and wanting to ease it. Show compassion, treated with compassion, compassion for the families.
It is stronger than sympathy, which is feeling for somebody, and different from empathy, which is understanding what they feel without necessarily wanting to act. Compassion contains the wish to help, and that is what distinguishes it. The word is central in medicine, social care and religion. Note compassionate leave, which is time off work after a death in the family, and compassion fatigue, which is the exhaustion of caring too much for too long.
1nouncompassionSympathy for somebody's suffering, with a wish to help.
“She was treated with compassion by everybody on that ward.”
compassion is a caring feeling.
The Latin is com, together, and pati, to suffer: the same suffering that is in passion. Compassion is suffering along with somebody.
hooks ontopassion
Latin compati is com-, with, plus pati, to suffer — to suffer with somebody. It is a word-for-word translation of the Greek sympatheia, which gives English sympathy, so compassion and sympathy are the same idea built twice in two languages.
Latin
compati
Ecclesiastical Latin
compassio — sympathy
Old French
compassion
Middle English
compassioun
English, today
compassion
Built from
From Middle English compassioun, compassion, from Old French compassion, from Ecclesiastical Latin compassio (“sympathy”), from Latin compati, past participle compassus (“to suffer together with”), from com- (“together”) + pati (“to suffer”); see passion. by surface analysis, com- + passion.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA