empathy

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for empathy is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈɛmpəθi/. Corpus data places it at rank #10,844 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 11 documented wrong-spelling variants for empathy, with forms such as "emapthy", "emmpathy", and "empahty". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 2 confusable-pair relationships, "empty", "empathic", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: A twentieth-century borrowing from Ancient Greek ἐμπάθεια (empátheia, literally “passion”) (formed from ἐν (en, “in, at”) + πάθος (páthos, “feeling”)), equivalent to em- + -pathy, coined by Edward Bradford Titchener in 1909 to translate German Einfühlung. T… 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 empathy, spelled E-M-P-A-T-H-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.