fellow feeling

plural fellow feelings · alternative fellow-feeling

1. uncountableusuallyA sense of sympathy for, consideration of, or shared interests with one or more other human beings.

   A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his own life with theirs.

   1894 December – 1895 November, Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, […], published 1896, →OCLC

   5 more examples

   But here my heart is wrung with pity and fellow feeling, when I reflect what miseries must have been their lot, and how bitterly so refined a people must have smarted, to have forced them upon the use of it.

   1768, Mr. Yorick [pseudonym; Laurence Sterne], A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, volume (please specify |volume=I or II), London: […] T. Becket and P. A. De Hondt, […], →OCLC

   [I]s the character and property of the man, who labours for our intellectual pleasures, less entitled to a share of our fellow feeling, than that of the wine-merchant or milliner?

   1817, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, chapter 2, in Biographia Literaria

   “Besides, I was always interfering in the details. Being myself one of the laziest of mortals, I had altogether too much fellow-feeling for the lazy; […]

   1851 June – 1852 April, Harriet Beecher Stowe, chapter XIX, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly, volume II, Boston, Mass.: John P[unchard] Jewett & Company; Cleveland, Oh.: Jewett, Proctor & Worthington, published 20 March 1852, →OCLC

   "[H]ow kindly we reciprocate each other's little delicacies, don't we? What better proof, now, that we are kind, considerate fellows, with responsive fellow-feelings—eh, barber?"

   1857 April 1, Herman Melville, chapter 43, in The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, New York, N.Y.: Dix, Edwards & Co., […], →OCLC

   “Well, I couldn’t do my duty as a clergyman, any more than you could do yours as a governess. You ought to have a little fellow-feeling there, Mary.”

   1871–1872, George Eliot [pseudonym; Mary Ann Evans], chapter XIV, in Middlemarch […], volume (please specify |volume=I to IV), Edinburgh; London: William Blackwood and Sons, →OCLC, book II

   Synonyms: empathy, sympathy, bowels, commiseration, compassion, empathy, mercy, pity