Empathized

Empathized is the past tense of empathize (American spelling) or empathise (British spelling). The verb means to understand and share the feelings of another, or to place oneself in someone else’s emotional experience. To empathize with someone is to imagine what they are going through and to respond with appropriate concern or support. Empathy comprises cognitive aspects (perspective-taking) and affective aspects (emotional resonance); when someone has empathized, they have engaged at least one of these dimensions.

Usage: Common in psychology, counseling, education, customer service, and everyday speech. It is often contrasted with sympathize, which implies pity or sorrow without necessarily sharing the other person’s emotional state.

Spelling and variations: empathized (US), empathised (UK).

Etymology: derived from empathy, which ultimately traces to pathos “feeling” in Greek, with its modern sense developed through European languages and English in the 19th and early 20th centuries; the verb form was created by adding the suffix -ize to the noun.

Examples: “The nurse empathized with the patient’s anxiety.” “She empathized with the protagonist’s struggles.”