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compersion

Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.

Letters

10 characters

Language

English

word origin

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Detailed reference entry for the English word "compersion", 10-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Hunspell error dictionaries, and usage frequency ranked against the top 100,000 English words in the Wordfreq corpus. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "compersion" includes synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and cross-language translation pointers sourced from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org extract. Whether you are verifying the correct spelling of "compersion" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.

compersion is aEnglishnoun. It means: Vicarious joy associated with seeing one's partner have a joyful romantic or sexual relationship with another person. Pronounced /kəmˈpɜːʒn̩/.

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Key facts for compersion
PropertyValue
Headwordcompersion
LanguageEnglish
Part of speechNoun
IPA/kəmˈpɜːʒn̩/
Letters10
Misspellings tracked0
Confusable pairs0
SourceWiktionary (kaikki.org)

Frequency rank visualization

compersion is not present in the top-100,000 ranked English corpus, typical for technical, archaic, or low-frequency vocabulary.

Source: Wordfreq corpus

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for compersion is 10 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /kəmˈpɜːʒn̩/. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader.Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for compersion in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

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… Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is compersion, spelled C-O-M-P-E-R-S-I-O-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.

Definition

  1. 1
    Vicarious joy associated with seeing one's partner have a joyful romantic or sexual relationship with another person.
  2. 2
    The feeling of joy one has experiencing another's joy, such as in witnessing a toddler's joy and feeling joy in response.

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.

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Frequently Asked Questions

How do you spell "compersion"?
"compersion" is spelled C-O-M-P-E-R-S-I-O-N. The IPA pronunciation is /kəmˈpɜːʒn̩/.
What does "compersion" mean?
As a noun, "compersion" means: Vicarious joy associated with seeing one's partner have a joyful romantic or sexual relationship with another person.
How do you pronounce "compersion"?
The IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) transcription for "compersion" is /kəmˈpɜːʒn̩/. Click the speaker icon on the pronunciation badge above to hear it spoken aloud where audio is available.
What is the origin of the word "compersion"?
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), wit... See the full etymology section above for more details.
Is PlainSpell free to use?
Yes, PlainSpell is a completely free word reference. You can look up definitions, pronunciations, confusable pairs, homophones, and spelling corrections across 5 languages without any sign-up or subscription.

Nearby English words

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Data Source: Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Frequency data from Wordfreq. Misspellings derived from Hunspell dictionaries.