Pathos

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /ˈpeɪˌθɒs/

Definitions

1. It signifies a persuasive technique that elicits strong emotions in an audience through communication methods
2. This term represents the ability to evoke feelings that drive the audience's response in various forms of expression
3. A quality in speech, writing, or art that stirs deep emotions such as pity, sorrow, or compassion in the audience

Etymology: In ancient Greek, "páthos" meant "suffering," but it also carried the broader sense of something that happens to a person, an experience or state of being acted upon. The root came from the verb "paskhein," to suffer or undergo, and the same root gave Greek a whole family of words built around enduring what life or other people do to you. The noun was less about pain in a narrow sense than about the condition of being affected by something outside yourself. English borrowed the word from Greek in its original sense, but the emotional meaning we use today took shape through rhetoric. Greek and Roman writers on persuasion used "pathos" for the stirring of an audience's feelings, one of the three classical means of persuasion alongside logos (reasoned argument) and ethos (the speaker's character). A speech that moved listeners to pity or sorrow was said to work through pathos, and that technical sense is what English speakers mostly still mean when they call a film or novel "full of pathos."

Synonyms: emotion, feeling, passion, sorrow, sympathy

Antonyms: indifference, apathy, unemotionality