empathy
- 01 C2 Proficiency
an old slang name for the drug MDMA.
a slang term for the drug MDMA (3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine), referencing its empathogenic effects.
Simple“In the early days of the club scene, some people referred to the drug as empathy.”
In context“The term empathy was briefly used as a street name for MDMA in the 1980s before ecstasy became the dominant moniker.”
Teacher's tipThis sense is largely obsolete and rarely encountered by modern speakers.
empathy vs sympathy — Sympathy is feeling for someone; empathy is feeling with someone.
“But empathy and respect can open the door to necessary conversations.”
“We believe that reading is empathy operating in its simplest form: imagining your way into someone else’s experience and understanding the ripple effects of their actions.”
A twentieth-century borrowing from Ancient Greek ἐμπάθεια (empátheia, literally “passion”) (formed from ἐν (en, “in, at”) + πάθος (páthos, “feeling”)), equivalent to em- + -pathy, coined by Edward Bradford Titchener in 1909 to translate German Einfühlung. The modern word in Greek εμπάθεια (empátheia) has an opposite meaning denoting strong negative feelings and prejudice against someone.
Etymology adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.