Empathy vs sympathy: what’s the difference?
Empathy is the ability to understand or share another person’s feelings by imagining yourself in their situation. Sympathy is feeling sorry for someone going through something difficult, and usually showing that you care. Empathy feels with someone; sympathy feels for them.
empathy
noun
The ability to understand or share another person’s feelings by picturing yourself in their place.
“Having moved schools twice herself, she had real empathy for the new boy.”
sympathy
noun
Sorrow or concern for someone who is suffering or in trouble, often shown in what you say or do.
“The whole office signed a card to offer their sympathy after his father died.”
How to choose
Reach for empathy when the point is understanding from the inside: you can picture what someone is going through and feel something of it yourself. It is often described as a quality or skill: a doctor with real empathy, a manager who shows it. It covers more than sad moments: you can share a friend’s nerves before a driving test, or their relief when they pass.
Reach for sympathy when someone is having a hard time and you feel sorry for them or want to say so. It is the usual word for showing care after a loss or setback: people offer their sympathy, send a sympathy card or sign one “With deepest sympathy”, and “my sympathies” is a slightly formal alternative. You can feel sympathy without having been through the same thing. Sympathy can also mean sharing someone’s feelings, a sense found in older writing and still heard today, so the words overlap, though everyday English mostly keeps them apart.
Applied to an idea, a view or a cause, sympathy usually means agreement or support: “I have some sympathy with that argument” means you partly agree, and someone “sympathetic to the plan” favours it. Empathy is not used this way. The verbs are empathise and sympathise, both followed by with, and the adjectives are empathetic (or empathic) and sympathetic.
| Situation | Better word | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Writing a card to a colleague whose mother has died | sympathy | The usual word for expressing sorrow after a loss. |
| Knowing exactly how a friend’s exam panic feels because you remember your own | empathy | Sharing the feeling from the inside. |
| Saying you partly agree with a colleague’s proposal | sympathy | Here it means agreement with or support for an idea. |
| Describing a nurse who senses what worried patients are feeling | empathy | Understanding feelings from the patient’s point of view. |
Similar words worth knowing
- Compassion: sympathy for someone’s suffering, together with a wish to help. It tends to lead to action.
- Pity: feeling sorry for someone, sometimes from a better-off position. It can sound condescending, which is why people say they do not want anyone’s pity.
- Condolences: a formal expression of sympathy to someone bereaved, usually plural: you offer your condolences to the family.
- Understanding: as an adjective, patient and kind about other people’s problems. An understanding boss lets you leave early when your child is ill.
Play: empathy or sympathy?
Three sentences. Pick the word that fits, then see why.
Empathy or sympathy
1 / 3“Inside the card she wrote, ‘Thinking of you all, with deepest ____.’”
Check the answer
Sympathy. It is the set phrase for a card after a death. “With deepest empathy” is not something people write.
“Good teachers need ____: the ability to imagine how a lesson feels to a pupil who is completely lost.”
Check the answer
Empathy. The sentence describes picturing someone else’s experience from their side.
“I have some ____ with her argument, though I would not go as far as she does.”
Check the answer
Sympathy. Here it means partial agreement with a view. Empathy means understanding someone, not agreeing with their view.
Your score
Practise choices like this
Choosing between two words that both nearly fit is the kind of decision arcoco’s games ask you to make. Try the five-round word game on our homepage, or see how arcoco works. We make arcoco; the examples on this page were written for it and are not taken from the app.
For full dictionary entries, see Cambridge Dictionary for empathy and sympathy.