Ruthfulness

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The quality of being full of compassion, pity, or tenderness toward others who are suffering or in distress
2. A tender, sympathetic disposition that makes a person feel and show pity for those who are hurt or unfortunate
3. Compassionate feeling and gentleness of spirit, the opposite of being harsh, cruel, or merciless toward another

Etymology: Ruthfulness is a plain formation: it takes "ruthful", an adjective built from the noun "ruth", and adds the suffix "-ness", which turns an adjective into a noun for a quality. The base "ruth" is older than the word itself, and it once carried a sense close to pity or compassion before the modern sense of cruelty without pity grew from its negative form, "ruthless." The noun is recorded in Middle English in the form "reowthfulnesse," which shows how the word was built from the start: an adjective plus the suffix, with no borrowing from another language. The earlier spelling reflects the Middle English "reowth," the form from which "ruth" descends. Because the word is a straightforward compound of this kind, its history is largely the history of its parts, and the meaning of the whole follows from them.

Synonyms: compassion, mercy, pity

Antonyms: ruthlessness, cruelty, callousness