Meaning & use
pathos
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Meanings
noununcountableliterary
The quality in a story, speech, or work of art that makes people feel pity, sadness, or sympathy.
Grammar: Uncountable; common frames are 'a sense of pathos' and 'full of pathos.'
Patterns
- full of pathos
- a sense of pathos
There is real pathos in the scene where the old man returns home.
The movie mixes comedy with genuine pathos.
noununcountablespecialist
The rhetorical appeal to the audience's emotions, one of Aristotle's three modes of persuasion.
Grammar: Uncountable; contrast with ethos (credibility) and logos (logic).
Patterns
- an appeal to pathos
- use pathos
The advertisement relies on pathos, showing images of abandoned animals.
The candidate used pathos as well as facts to win support.
Common combinations
- full of pathos
- The farewell speech was full of pathos.
- a sense of pathos
- There was a quiet sense of pathos in the empty playground.
- evoke pathos
- The music perfectly evokes pathos without becoming sentimental.
- appeal to pathos
- The lawyer's closing argument included a strong appeal to pathos.
- a touch of pathos
- The story has a touch of pathos that stays with the reader.
Synonyms and how they differ
- poignancy
- The closest synonym; poignancy is a sharp, touching sadness, while pathos covers a wider range of pity.
- sadness
- The simple feeling itself; pathos is a quality in a work that produces the feeling in an audience.
- pity
- The emotion felt toward someone suffering; pathos is the quality that evokes it.
Word family
- pathetic adjective
- Originally 'arousing pity,' but in everyday speech it often means hopelessly inadequate.
- pathetically adverb
- In a way that arouses pity; informally, very badly or inadequately.
- empathy noun
- Shares the Greek root for feeling; the ability to share another person's feelings.
- apathy noun
- Historically 'absence of feeling'; now means lack of interest or concern.
Commonly confused: pathos or bathos?
pathos vs bathos
Bathos is a sudden drop from the serious to the trivial, an anticlimax; pathos is serious, sympathetic feeling.
Practice
In classical rhetoric, an argument based on pathos appeals to the audience's ___.
Choose one answer.
Pathos is the appeal to emotion, while logic corresponds to logos and authority or trust to ethos; experience is not one of the three modes.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “pathos”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.