Word of the Day:
pathetic
What It Means
Arousing pity, sympathy, or compassion; exciting pathos.
Arousing scorn or contempt, often due to miserable inadequacy.
Expressing or showing anger; passionate.
You're almost 26 years old and you still can't hold a real job? That's pathetic.
Pathetic in Context
“On a certain Good Friday, in what year we are not told, an especially moving and pathetic sermon was preached in the Cathedral by Father John Texeda, upon the sufferings of our Lord.”
Did You Know?
From Middle French pathétique, from Latin patheticus, from Ancient Greek παθητικός (pathētikós, “subject to feeling, capable of feeling, impassioned”), from παθητός (pathētós, “one who has suffered, subject to suffering”), from πάσχω (páskhō, “to suffer”). By surface analysis, path- + -etic.
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: pathetic (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “pathetic.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pathetic. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
