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fellow feeling

fellow feeling

1 4.5
A feeling of sympathy and understanding for someone who is sad or in trouble
  • noun
  • /ˈfɛloʊ ˈfiːlɪŋ/
translation icon : empatía
  • Nora felt a fellow feeling with her mother.
  • fellow feeling and solidarity

So they, they see another animal of their own sort and they feel a kind of fellow feeling towards it.

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Examples

  • I worked up a lot of fellow feeling for the amazing fellow.

    Fiction book (1995)
  • If you have, you certainly don't seem to show much fellow feeling about it.

    Blog text (14)
  • So they, they see another animal of their own sort and they feel a kind of fellow feeling towards it.

  • " As it happens, I have a bit of fellow feeling for you.

    Fiction book (1992)
  • Thanks for the fellow feeling and also for the link.

    Blog text (28)
  • But what if the combination doesn't work? What if the fellow feeling doesn't flow freely?

    Academic text (2011)
  • The Public and Its Problems looked forward to a time when the intimacy and fellow-feeling of small-town America could be replicated on a national scale.

    Academic text (1997)
  • Defining the nature of Christian devotion, Hugh posits three expressions of fellow-feeling, with compassion at the center.

    Academic text (2008)
  • Our joy for the deliverance of those heroes of tragedy or romance who interest us is as sincere as our grief for their distress, and our fellow-feeling with their misery is not more real than that with their happiness...

    Academic text (2010)
  • She felt a deep sense of fellow feeling for those affected by the recent disaster.

Synonyms

sympathy
vsfellow feeling
273 1.8

Feeling of understanding and sharing another person's sadness

is a gentler general sense of understanding for another's distress
empathy
vsfellow feeling
154 3.2

Ability to understand and share another person's feelings and experiences

focuses on a sense of concern and understanding rather than ability to share experiences
mutual understanding
vsfellow feeling
4 3.4

A situation where two or more people share the same feelings and ideas

focuses on one person's sense of concern rather than a shared feeling between people

Antonyms

71 4.6

Lack of interest or concern about something

43 6.2

A lack of interest or care about things

How Sympathetic

compassion
423 2.7
empathy
154 3.2
fellow feeling
1 4.5
sympathy
273 1.8
pity
156 1.1

Surface Forms

Morphology

fellow + feeling

The meaning 'a sense of sympathy for others' is directly compositional from 'fellow' (a person of the same group/another person) + 'feeling' (an emotional response): i.e. a feeling directed toward fellow people. This concept is cross-linguistically common and, despite being somewhat formal or literary, a B1 learner who knows both constituents can reasonably infer the intended meaning.

Etymology

The phrase fellow feeling comes from the simple image of a fellow as a friend who shares a feeling with you. That's why it means 'sympathy' and 'understanding' for someone else's pain.