Word.ws English Dictionary

pathetic fallacy

pathetic fallacy noun: the attribution of human thoughts and feelings to inanimate objects.

Noun

pathetic fallacy (plural pathetic fallacies)

  1. The attribution of human thoughts and feelings to inanimate objects.
    • Taking, therefore, this wide field, it is surely a very notable circumstance, to begin with, that this pathetic fallacy is eminently characteristic of modern painting. For instance, Keats, describing a wave, breaking, out at sea, says of it
      Down whose green back the short-lived foam, all...1856, John Ruskin, chapter XII, in Modern Painters […], volume III, London: Smith, Elder and Co., […], →OCLC, part IV (Of Many Things), § 2, page 184
    • The next generation of AI will put the pathetic fallacy on steroids.2022 June 14, Ian Bogost, “Google’s ‘Sentient’ Chatbot Is Our Self-Deceiving Future”, in The Atlantic

pathetic fallacy meaning in Tamil

pathetic fallacy in Tamil

தற்குறிப்பேற்றம்

Forms of pathetic fallacy

pluralpathetic fallacies

Origin of pathetic fallacy

Coined by British cultural critic John Ruskin in 1856 in his work Modern Painters. Here, fallacy does not refer to a logical fallacy but should be understood as “a falsehood, something that is untrue”, while pathetic here means “caused by an excited state of the feelings”; thus, “emotional misrepresentation”, not “contemptible illogic”.

Questions about pathetic fallacy

What does pathetic fallacy mean?
Pathetic fallacy means the attribution of human thoughts and feelings to inanimate objects.
What is pathetic fallacy in Tamil?
Pathetic fallacy in Tamil is தற்குறிப்பேற்றம். See Pathetic fallacy meaning in Tamil.
What part of speech is pathetic fallacy?
Pathetic fallacy is a noun.
What is the plural of pathetic fallacy?
The plural of pathetic fallacy is pathetic fallacies.

Words near pathetic fallacy in the dictionary

  1. pathergy
  2. pathers
  3. Pathet Lao
  4. pathetic
  5. pathetic fallacies
  6. pathetic fallacy
  7. pathetic nerve
  8. pathetic nerves
  9. pathetical
  10. pathetically
  11. patheticalness

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pathetic fallacy (page history and authors); pathetic fallacy (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “pathetic fallacy.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pathetic_fallacy. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.