Meaning & use
empathize
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Meanings
verbintransitive
To understand how another person feels because you can imagine yourself in their situation.
Grammar: No direct object; use with: I empathize with you. Not empathize you.
Patterns
- empathize with someone
- empathize with someone's situation
I can empathize with you; I had the same worry before my first exam.
Good nurses empathize with their patients without becoming overwhelmed.
It is hard to empathize with a person whose life you have never glimpsed.
verbintransitive
To share another person's feelings so strongly that you feel them too.
Grammar: Often used in psychology: empathize with a character in a story.
Patterns
- empathize with someone
Readers empathize with the hero because his struggles feel real.
Children often empathize with a crying friend and start crying too.
Word forms
| third person singular | empathizes |
|---|---|
| past tense | empathized |
| past participle | empathized |
| -ing form | empathizing |
Common combinations
- empathize with
- I empathize with anyone who has lost a pet.
- easy to empathize with
- The main character is easy to empathize with.
- deeply empathize
- She could deeply empathize with the refugees.
- struggle to empathize
- Some people struggle to empathize with strangers.
- learn to empathize
- Children learn to empathize through stories.
Synonyms and how they differ
- sympathize
- Sympathize means feeling sorry for someone, while empathize means sharing or understanding the feeling from the inside.
- relate
- Relate is more casual and means you see the connection to your own experience, often followed by to.
- identify
- Identify with suggests seeing yourself in another person or character, which can be stronger than empathizing.
- commiserate
- Commiserate means expressing sorrow with someone about a misfortune, and it is limited to unhappy events.
Opposites
Word family
- empathy noun
- the ability to understand and share feelings
- empathetic adjective
- able to understand others' feelings
- empathic adjective
- another form of empathetic
- empathetically adverb
- in a way that shows understanding of feelings
Commonly confused: empathize or sympathize?
empathize vs sympathize
You sympathize when you feel sorry for someone's trouble, but you empathize when you share or understand their feelings.
Practice
Which sentence is correct?
Choose one answer.
Empathize takes the preposition with. The other options use the wrong preposition or none.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “empathize”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.