Empathy is the ability to take in other people’s feelings and problems as if you were standing near their heart, not only looking from far away. You do not have to have lived the same life; you do have to try to feel the shape of it. In English classrooms this word is often set next to sympathy so students can split “I understand you” from “I feel sorry for you.” You meet it in psychology, in school talks about being a good friend, and in ordinary conversation. It is a twentieth-century English word: the psychologist Edward Bradford Titchener coined it in 1909 to translate German Einfühlung (“feeling into”). He built it from Ancient Greek empátheia (literally “passion”), from en “in” + páthos “feeling,” so em- + -pathy. Though actually, if you say εμπάθεια in modern Greek, you are not praising someone: there it points to strong bad feeling and prejudice against a person — almost the opposite of the English sense.