compersion
/kəmˈpɜːʒn̩/
"compersion" is a 10-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“compersion” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 10
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Vicarious joy associated with seeing one's partner have a joyful romantic or sexual relationship with another person.
Corpus desk
Index EN-compersion · compersion · English
compersion · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 10 letters
- VOW-4 4 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "C" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | compersion |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /kəmˈpɜːʒn̩/ |
| Letters | 10 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “compersion” in English
Rare enough to double-check
compersion is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun, transcribed /kəmˈpɜːʒn̩/. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 2 senses are on record.
Our edit-distance generator produced no likely misspellings for compersion, since its letter sequence doesn't invite the usual edit-distance slips. This entry stands alone in our confusable dataset, suggesting its spelling stands apart enough that readers rarely confuse it with something else.
Etymologically, the entry records: Coined in the early 1990s by a group of members of the Kerista Commune, a polyamorous group based in San Francisco, California, U.S.A., in existence between 1956 and 1991, apparently randomly using an alphabet board (similar to a Ouija board), with -ion (su… The correct English form is compersion, spelled C-O-M-P-E-R-S-I-O-N.
Definition
- 1Vicarious joy associated with seeing one's partner have a joyful romantic or sexual relationship with another person.
- 2The feeling of joy one has experiencing another's joy, such as in witnessing a toddler's joy and feeling joy in response.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how compersion appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
A major component of jealousy, for many people, is the suspicion or resentment of the rival. In Kerista, on the other hand, the relationship that every man had with the other men and that every woman had with the other women elicited what they called "compersion" rather than jealousy. "Compersion is the positive warm feeling you experience when you see tw…
There is nothing either magical or wrong with sex with more than one person at the same time. […] The beautiful thing about this dynamic is that it offers opportunities for compersion (the opposite of jealousy) and is symbolic of the expansiveness and unity we can feel in our love for each other.
Etymology
Coined in the early 1990s by a group of members of the Kerista Commune, a polyamorous group based in San Francisco, California, U.S.A., in existence between 1956 and 1991, apparently randomly using an alphabet board (similar to a Ouija board), with -ion (suffix forming nouns). The hypothesis that the word is derived from French compère (“partner”) + English -sion (a variant of -tion (suffix forming nouns)), based on an earlier use of French compérage by the French anthropologist and ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) to denote the practice of brothers-in-law sharing wives observed among Tupi people of the Brazilian Amazon, is less plausible: a website run by former members of the community states that neither the word compérage nor Lévi-Strauss’s work was known to them at the time, and the formation of the word in this way does not correspond to any known morphological process.
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.