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Topic: Empathy

A recent dinner party netted us the following challenges: define the difference between empathic and empathetic; and reveal whether cohabit or cohabitate is the correct term to describe living with another person.

Do you feel our pain? We're struggling to figure out how we can live with the notion that, first, there is no distinction between empathic and empathetic and second—well, let's look at empathy first.

The word empathy—which developed from the Greek word for "passion" and which has still-older linguistic kin in terms meaning "feelings, emotion"—first appeared in English in 1850. Empathy names "the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another (of either the past or present) without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit way."

It took another six decades before the adjective form of empathy appeared: empathic, meaning "involving, eliciting, characterized by, or based on empathy," first appeared in print 100 years ago; empathetic followed a few decades later. What's the difference in meaning? Absolutely nothing, but empathetic is more common.

Okay, now we're ready to move into the cohabit-cohabitate conundrum. Although the five syllables of the noun cohabitation may lead you to assume the verb form might be cohabitate, in fact cohabit is the standard verb.

Questions or comments? Write us at wftw@aol.com Production and research support for Word for the Wise comes from Merriam-Webster, publisher of language reference books and Web sites including Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition.