Consolate

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. To comfort or ease the grief and sorrow of someone in pain or distress
2. To offer solace and reassurance to a person who is suffering or unhappy
3. To soothe and provide emotional relief to someone experiencing sadness or anguish

Etymology: "Consolate" is an obsolete English verb meaning to comfort or console, and it entered the language in 1477 as a borrowing of Latin "cōnsōlātus," the past participle of "cōnsōlārī," meaning to comfort thoroughly. The Latin verb is built from "con-," an intensifying prefix, and "solari," to soothe, so the word has always carried the sense of bringing solace to someone in distress. Its closest relative is "console," which arrived in English through French and so reached the language by a different route from the same Latin source. Having two English words descended from one Latin verb, one taken directly and one filtered through French, is what linguists call a doublet. The direct borrowing "consolate" was used for a while alongside "console," but it did not survive into modern usage, and "console" is the form that remains in everyday English.