Gratitude is the warm feeling towards somebody who helped you — thanks as a feeling rather than as a word. Your neighbour fed the cat for a fortnight in November and you are still thinking about it in March.
You feel gratitude, you show it, you express it, and you owe somebody a debt of gratitude when what they did was large. It takes TO and FOR: gratitude to her sister for the loan. The adjective is grateful, and there is no such word as gratitudeful. Gratitude is uncountable, so there is never a gratitude or two gratitudes, only some gratitude or a great deal of it. Therapists have turned it into a routine as well: a gratitude journal is a list of things you are glad about, written before bed.
1noungratitudeThe feeling of being thankful towards somebody for something they have done.
“She wrote to him years later to say that the gratitude had never faded.”
synonyms: thankfulness, appreciation
gratitude is a feeling.
Gratitude came from French, which had it from Medieval Latin grātitūdō, thankfulness, built on Latin grātus, thankful. English already owned a perfectly good word for the feeling, þancung, the ancestor of thanking, and took the Latin one anyway. That is how English settles most arguments of this kind: it keeps both words and gives each a different weight.
French
gratitude
English, today
gratitude
Borrowed from French gratitude. From French gratitude, from Medieval Latin grātitūdō (“thankfulness”), from Latin grātus (“thankful”). þancung.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA