Sympathetic describes a person who feels for you and shows it. The colleague who listens to the whole story without checking her phone, the doctor who says 'that sounds painful' before reaching for the form.
It also means being on someone's side: a government sympathetic to the strikers, a sympathetic reading of a difficult book, a sympathetic character in a novel, meaning one you are meant to root for. Be careful, because this is a false friend: French sympathique, German sympathisch and Spanish simpático mean nice and likeable, and English sympathetic does not. Call a stranger sympathetic in English and you have said they pitied somebody, not that they were good company. The technical uses go their own way, since the sympathetic nervous system runs your fight-or-flight response and a sympathetic vibration is a string that hums because a different string was plucked. The noun is sympathy, and it takes FOR a person and WITH a position.
1adjectivesympatheticFeeling and showing care for someone else's trouble.
“The nurse was sympathetic and stayed with him until the results came.”
synonyms: understanding, compassionate, kind
2adjectivesupportiveIn agreement with a person, cause or idea, and inclined to support it.
“The magazine gave the plan a sympathetic hearing.”
synonyms: supportive, favourable
3adjectivecharacterOf a character or portrayal: presented so that people warm to them and take their side.
“The film makes the thief the most sympathetic person in it.”
4adjectivecausedCaused by activity somewhere else, as with the sympathetic nervous system or a sympathetic vibration.
“The empty glass rang with a sympathetic hum.”
Also accepted in games: understanding
English took sympathetic from Latin sympathēticus in the mid 1600s, and the first meaning was nothing to do with kindness. It described an affinity, an invisible influence passing between things at a distance, the sort of connection people believed could act like magic. The feeling-for-someone sense grew out of that, and the word pushed out the older English efnþrōwiende.
Latin
sympathēticus
English, today
sympathetic
Mid 17th century in the sense relating to an affinity or paranormal influence, from Latin sympathēticus. by surface analysis, en + sympathy + etic; compare pathetic. Displaced native efnþrōwiende.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Feelings & Character, A Man Called Ove
First appears in chapter 7 of A Man Called Ove.
Practise this word